Amazon Marketplace: Great for Selling, not for Buying
Tue, 6 March, 2007 – 12:34 am
Online shopping is great until you factor in the delivery charges. I don't mind paying up to £6 to have £50-100 worth of shopping delivered by hand. In fact I'm even happy to pay a couple of quid for a CD or DVD to be delivered. It saves me wasting hours hunting around somewhere like HMV, looking for the music I want which is completely in the wrong section and the staff there look at you like you're mad or outdated when you ask about a group that's not in the mainstream charts.
I buy pretty much all of my DVDs, CDs and books from Amazon. It's quick and easy, and I don't have to have my credit card handy every time. However there are a couple of gripes with Amazon. First off I want to buy from Amazon and not some marketplace seller, yet there is no option to only show Amazon products. If you set the results with Price Low to High, most of the first few pages are products which are being offered at a ridiculous price of 1p. You used to be able to spot the marketplace sellers, but now it's harder to tell them apart, especially when Amazon perhaps sells a version of whatever you're after (eg a Memory card) but not the capacity you want.
My second gripe is Marketplace postage charges. I appreciate these are not set by the Marketplace sellers but they are borderline stupid. I've used Amazon in the past to sell Video boxsets. However, a boxset of 3 videos was classed as 1 product and my buyers would get charged about 70p or something minute and not worthwhile, whilst I had to shell out easily £2-3 on postage and packaging.
And from the buyer's point of view, depending on what you're buying, the postage can be well over the top. We've just been looking at buying a couple of mini SD cards for our mobile phones. 2 Kingston 1GB cards came to around £10. Not a bad price at all. However, the postage for these minute, stamp sized (and not much heavier) cards…? £9.00!!!!. Yep £4.50 per item! Dave only recently bought a Firewire adaptor (6 to 4 pin or something like that) and had to pay £4.50 delivery. The adaptor turned up about a week later (so much for 2-3 days) and in a mini jiffy bag with a second class stamp on it. So less than £1 expense on the postage.
Of course I realise the Marketplace sellers may already be aware of these extortionate prices for minute products, and may adjust their prices accordingly, however I'm not prepaid to go with that idea until I'd checked out the competition. A quick look over some other recommended memory card sites and we came across Picstop. The 1GB Kingston mini SD cards were virtually the same price as on Amazon with just 99p per product postage. This works out at over £6 in savings for the same product.
Is Amazon's Marketplace badly priced? And is there any way to omit their products from an Amazon search?
(Just for the record, I have bought DVDs and books of Marketplace in the past and I know some postage prices are reasonably priced, but some are plain daft!).
5 Responses to “Amazon Marketplace: Great for Selling, not for Buying”
They're plain idiotic and daft… i used to sell books on there and as you say if it's not screwing the buyer it's screwing the seller. Time and time again I was asked to post books at such a silly P+P price that i may have just walked out onto the street and given the things away for free.
By Martin Paling on Mar 8, 2007
I think both sides are screwed at some point. £9 for delivery of 2 mini SD cards is clearly not screwing the seller (well not until the buyer goes elsewhere like we did!). The whole postage system is just ridiculous there, which is mad considering Amazon's own postage system (when spending under £15) is pretty good usually, such as X about for the first DVD and Y amount for each subsequent one etc. And it combines postage and works it out a lot more fairly.
I don't agree with making profit on postage. I don't like clients who try to do so, and I don't like it being done to me either.
By Sarah on Mar 9, 2007
I agree, the postage charges on some Marketplace items are crazy. I was just browsing Amazon for a couple of books and noticed that Marketplace sellers were selling theirs for around £3 cheaper than the Amazon price. So, I popped two of them into my basket. One book was £1-94, the other was £2.01. I went through to the checkout page and reviewed the order, thinking that it would be around £5-£6 in total. It was almost £10 altogether
That is completely insane. I then looked on Play.com and I can get both books, brand new, for less than £10!
By Sam on Apr 27, 2007
I must admit I often forget to go and have a look on Play.com for some items.
By Sarah on Apr 29, 2007