I've been selling books on Amazon full time for the past 17 years. Something has happened in the past couple months and especially the past two weeks that for me is inexplicable. Our sales are down tremendously. In these 17 years I've seen slow periods, but this is different. It's not the season, our inventory, competition, etc. Something has definitely been done so that prospective clients are not seeing and buying the books we sell. There must have been a recent tweak to the Amazon algorithm that did not take into account the fact that most booksellers are not brand owners. The majority of the 75,000 publishing houses in the USA do not sell directly on Amazon and they depend on sellers like us to show their books to the public. If Amazon is directing most keyword searches only to the listings of some big publishers who do sell here directly (again, most do not), or for booksellers who use FBA, they are doing a dis-service to Amazon clients who will see a very limited selection of books.
I deal mostly with niche books from small publishers who have no representation here except me. I think that whatever was done recently, at least as concerns booksellers, is a mistake and needs to be re-tweaked.
I'd love to hear from other booksellers here about this and even more so, from someone at Amazon.