Back in the early '00s I had an individual seller account and sold thousands of items through Amazon with a near-perfect feedback rating. I stopped selling here after approx a decade. In 2017 I started a new company, and - after a grueling vetting process (apparently my history meant nothing!) - signed up for a pro seller account for $40 a month.
I was told this was the cost of selling on Amazon at the time. Turns out that was not true, I could've had a individual account. Since then I've spent thousands of dollars on unnecessary fees, all because I was given bad info.
But that's not the worst part - for those fees, Amazon rountinely (and, seemingly randomly) changed the content of my listings, gave me bad info on shipping services, and prevented my listings from showing up in simple searches. they let other sellers create listing pages for my products and THOSE showed up in searches. Every time I wanted to create a new listing page, I was forced to spend hours talking with CS to convince them my bar codes were legit, and - get this - when I search for my products, not only do they not show up, but the results include sponsored listings of BOOTLEG products. Cool.
I haven't had the bandwidth to call Amazon about all of this until today - my bad, not Amazon's fault - but I'd nearly died last year, so...
I was polite throughout, if frustrated, especially when I learned that 2017 CS had lied about the need for a paid account and I'd spent thosands on unnecessary fees.
After about 50 minutes going over all of this, the CS vanished and I got the "were you satisfied with the service you got today" survey.
My issues remain unresolved, CS never called back, and the e-mails that were supposed to include directions on how to resolve my issues never appeared. Time completely wasted, apparently.
In my view not only has Amazon stolen money from me, they didn't even provide the most basic services I was paying for - I mean, if the search doesn't function, what am I paying for?