What people in this thread aren't getting, because they're not in the industry as a 3rd party seller: Amazon is double dipping, because not only do you pay the

What people in this thread aren't getting, because they're not in the industry as a 3rd party seller: Amazon is double dipping, because not only do you pay them a 15% fee to sell anything on their platform, now, increasingly in order for your products to get ANY visibility and traction, you also have to spend ~15-20% on advertising in order for your products to not get relegated to the 2nd or 3rd page, where customers won't go. This isn't because Amazon is evil. This is mostly because Amazon became too successful, so now where 4-5 sellers used to compete in a category, you now have 30+. So now you have no choice but to get them into a bidding war with each other for front page space, eating into their margins. Who's the main beneficiary of this? Amazon, of course. What's scummy of them is that they fully recognize this, yet refuse to reduce their 15% fee. In the past, the fee represented money paid to Amazon for your products to be visible on their platform (and for hosting product data and images). These days if you JUST pay the 15% fee, you will get literally 0 visibility and never get off the ground. But that's not all folks! Another way they're being scummy is having piss-poor algorithms that prevent you from raising the price on a product and disabling the listing for something they consider a high price. Well, obviously if you've created a system where you take 40% of the 50% markup, you constrain the 3rd party seller to never making more than 10% margin. Remember, this 10% must pay for 1. Returns 2. Employees that manage the catalog 3. Employees that manage order processing 4. Employees that deal with Amazon customer communication 5. Developers that make integrations for fulfillment purposes and help develop software to make catalog management easier. Is it any wonder then when this big brother is telling you to stop hitting yourself, while using your own hand to do so, that people get mad? Yet ANOTHER way they're being scummy is blatantly ripping off successful products, pushing them down, and promoting Amazon Basics brand or whatever they have now, selling the exact same thing. Tails I win, heads you lose indeed.