If you’ve read our blog at all, you know we’ve got a lot to say about the deficiencies of Amazon’s seller marketplace, from the sellers perspective.
Selling on Amazon; can this be fixed?
Amazon.com and suspended listings
Amazon feedback – don’t believe what you read
That’s just a select few.
Well they did it again, with our replacement gasket for vintage pressure cookers. The listing has been suspended and can not be reactivated.
By my calculations, over the last 12 months, 34 of 172 gaskets we’ve sold on Amazon.com have been returned; almost 20%. The root of the return problem is Amazons excessively generous return policy; this motivates most customers not bother with the minimum amount of due diligence before ordering. Combine that with the fact that Amazon routinely returns items to inventory that customers claimed were damaged, and you have the perfect storm for high returns, and the delisting of specialized replacement parts like ours.
It does appear that perhaps Amazon is taking some baby steps in the right direction. Last month, they announced that they will start flagging items with high return rates with a “frequently returned item” tag. I’m not sure if this is meant to truly help the problem or just mark certain items with a scarlet letter.
In any event, while we’ve tried to keep as many of our parts as possible available on Amazon for the convenience of the buyer, the headache of dealing with high returns for an items with modest sales just isn’t worth it; I am somewhat relieve to let this one go.
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