News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Amazon has made a change to the way it sells books, which may hurt publishers. Parent comment

Re:Amazon has made a change to the way it sells books, which... by joemi on Saturday May 20, 2017 @12:54PM (#14383224)
Though shouldn't the issue with used books being sold as new and ARCs being sold as new get sorted out just by customers complaining to Amazon about sellers? And if that doesn't fix it, isn't Amazon's handling of that the real problem, in those cases?

As someone knowledgeable about this stuff, what was the actual buybox policy change? As a third party seller, I've been getting emails from Amazon for years about winning the buybox, so I'm confused about what actually changed recently, since the article made it sound like third parties winning the buybox is a new thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon has made a change to the way it sells books, which... by ilamont on Saturday May 20, 2017 @01:09PM (#14383310)
The buy box policy has been in place for other categories for years. Only earlier this year did it open up for books. Prior, only the publisher controlled the buy box, although it was possible for sellers of new copies to be listed on the link to the third-party sellers.

Regarding the ARCs marked as such: not every customer will complain to Amazon. Some readers don't care, others complain to the publisher or the seller.

Amazon's handling of inventory has been a problem for a long time. This HN thread talks about commingling issues for products other than books (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13927641) which is mostly about pirated merchandise. Warehouse workers don't check or Amazon doesn't care. For the ARCs, I think most are fulfilled by the seller as opposed to going through Amazon FBA so there's no way for Amazon to even look at the book. They're going on the seller's word that it's a legit product for sale.

[ Parent | on HN ]