Time for me to stop selling on Amazon

I’ve written before about how terrible the user experience of Amazon’s Seller Central is.

It’s not just the first impressions of the UI looking like a pretty tired product. That’s not necessarily the end of the world. It is after all a massive system that has been around for a long time in internet terms.

Amazon Seller Central

More important than how it looks, is how unusable it is. I won’t belabour that point again. You can read what I said last time on the subject if you’re interested.

But even more important than how horrible the mechanics of selling on Amazon are, is Amazon itself.

Reasons not to like Amazon

As a human there are plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable with what Amazon is and what it stands for.

There’s countless bad press about how they treat their staff and their anti-unionism.

I'm uncomfortable with their near-monopoly on ebooks.

It’s not their fault that they’re feeding a habit to buy cheap crap and have it delivered the next day, but I don’t have to like them for it.

Yes, I’m a hypocrite, and as a consumer I still shop on Amazon, although less and less. As I do, I’m able to suppress the distaste of bile the way I do every time I fly with Ryan Air.

Buying on Amazon

Amazon in a broader sense offers some great products. Movies and TV series are good examples. But the difference there is that they face competition in those markets.

When it comes to buying physical products, Amazon has become so dominant that it’s now the default option for people in many cases. In some ways, the convenience of a one-stop-shop is great for consumers. But when it comes to keeping Amazon honest and serving their customers in the best possible way, it sucks.

Amazon doesn’t need to try any more. Previously when searching for products on Amazon, they would do their best to serve up options to you that match your needs.

Now, they serve up products that make Amazon the most money.

You could argue that in a functioning competitive market those two things should be the same. But Amazon doesn’t exist in a functioning competitive market.

Shoe laces

I was searching for shoe laces the other day. They’re the kind of simple product where I don’t really have any brand loyalty and I imagine they’re pretty easy to manufacture to acceptable tolerances. The perfect thing to buy on Amazon with maximum convenience.

Yet when I searched for them I was inundated with almost identical sponsored products with a bewildering variety of stupid made-up brand names.

Spammy brands

I’ve read and watched plenty of things to make me doubt the voracity of Amazon reviews, so after only a cursory look at them I picked (almost arbitrarily) some WEGOODZF shoe laces.

For shoe laces, the main things I care about are colour and length. The colour was easy enough - brown will do.

Then I scrolled down to pick a size.

Ridiculous product data

What on earth is going on there? I’m offered a selection of Size Names, but are they all 60cm (approx) as it says below?

And I can only guess that it’s a mixture of inches and centimetres in the top bit. Even my twelve-year-old self in science class couldn’t get away with mixing up and missing off units like that.

I find it hard to interpret it in any other way than that Amazon has contempt for their customers.

They’re at the point now that they don't even bother using readable letters in their made-up brand names.

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They couldn’t get away with this in parts of their business where they have more competition. Imagine how long Prime Video would last if their movies were cheap imitations of real movies with made-up actors and fake reviews?

(I probably shouldn’t speak too soon.)

Enshittification

Amazon has become the perfect case study in enshittification.

It’s such a great word, and sadly isn’t exclusive to Amazon. This essay from Cory Doctorow is really worth a read. He sums up a business’s enshittification like this:

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

In Amazon’s case, as Doctorow points out: “Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search.”

Time to stop selling on Amazon

My dissatisfaction with Amazon carries over into my Seller persona. I still have the same personal moral concerns when I’m a product creator and a brand owner. And I suppose until now I’ve been hypocritical in that regard too.

But now Amazon has become so bad from a user experience point of view (for sellers and buyers) that I'm genuinely embarrassed to have my products listed amongst all the crap on there.

So I will no longer be selling my products on Amazon.