In the past I have run my bead and jewelry ecommerce sites myself either with Zencart or with Drupal's Ubercart. Both solutions work well, but since I've been focusing on production, I decided that I needed a solution that was hosted and maintained by someone else in order to free up more time to make things. I am more than willing to pay for this service. I just want something that works and is easy for me and my customers to navigate. I did research on the various hosted ecommerce platforms. Eventually I settled on Amazon's WebStore. Their offer was hard to resist. Three months free and it included Selling on Amazon. I thought, "Hey! That's great since I buy lots of stuff on Amazon." I thought that since I like to shop on there and others obviously do too that it would be a good thing to get my stuff in their marketplace. Silly me.
What I didn't expect was to end up wasting nearly two months of my time on a solution that simply doesn't live up to their promises.
Sell on Amazon? Sure, you can do it but only if your items fall into very specific categories. Getting the Pro account is technically supposed to allow you to create a listing on Amazon.com. What they don't tell you in their promotional material is that:
- You have to have a UPC code to sell an item. Sure there are a few exceptions, but you have to be approved on an item by item basis. Does anyone really have the time for this?
- If your category is restricted like Jewelry then good luck getting accepted. Their two to three day promise of a decision is likely to take several weeks. And then if they couldn't approve you the first time for some reason, expect two more weeks.
Technical support
Dismal. I haven't run into anything this slow in years. Expect issues to take weeks to resolve. Their standard answer to any problem I had was to tell me to upgrade my browser to the latest version. I always run the latest version and found this non-answer to be exceedingly irritating, especially the second or third time around.
WebStore
Seriously, this program seems like it is still in Beta. Good luck trying to copy a listing you just entered. Help links take you to Forbidden pages. Want to make an item inactive? Not likely. I did it once before and now the link has vanished. Frankly, it's kind of a nightmare. I have to admit that the finished product is nice, really nice, once you spend a month or so learning the program. I don't see where it is worth the $25-$40-$55 per month though. The aggravation factor is just too high. I'm going to give it another month and see if I can get accepted into the Jewelry category, but right now I'm thinking this is a failed experiment and will probably just settle for a blog with Etsy listings or something.
Expense
Boy, and here I thought eBay was bad. Be ready to pay through the nose. They get you on every possible little thing they can think of: transaction fees, commission fees, closing fees, etc. One sale I had, I handed over nearly 35% to Amazon and that's not even including the monthly fee they will eventually charge. Unbelievable.
Conclusion
It's probably a really neat thing if you sell books or DVD's in volume, but if you are outside of the norm, have unique items, or sell items that don't have UPC codes you would do better to go somewhere else.
