Absolutely nothing will go wrong with this, and it will greatly reduce the amount of moderation necessary on the forums. This is such a good idea.

Since new sellers won’t be qualified to answer the questions of new sellers, who will be providing accurate and correct answers in this new New Seller Community? Either it will be other new sellers with no more information or experience than the person asking the question, or mods.

If this change is happening because some people feel that some forum posters are a bit short or inconsiderate to new sellers, it is worth noting that much of this “bluntness” is the result of seeing the same question a dozen times a day. Amazon expects sellers to know what they are doing before they start to sell, but does nothing to encourage or even suggest to new sellers that these expectations even exist, much less push them to actually learn anything before listing items.

“New account, never sold, now suspended!”
“New account, Amazon is stealing $40 from me!”
“Amazon asked me for invoices but doesn’t accept my Costco receipts and now they are stealing all my stuff!”
“I just ordered my first item from Alibaba, how do I know where to ship it?”
“I tried to sign up but Amazon rejected my verification and I put in my debit card like 100 times and they won’t accept it…”
“Amazon says I’m dropshipping, but my virtual assistant says he isn’t, what do I do?”

And on, and on…

Basically, unless something changes on Amazon’s onboarding side, whatever forum mods are tasked with answering these questions are going to suffer the same burnout of seeing the same question for the 400th time and having to have the same arguments when those new sellers don’t get the answer they want to hear.

No doubt Amazon has decided that they need to get more involved in the actual support part of the new forums. Great for them.

Sadly though many of those who will be supporting posters have no real Amazon Store experience, or understand the practicality of Amazon Policy for the seller.

Maybe I need to throw my hat into the ring. I can be nice when I want to …

Oneida_Amazon

I don’t know who questions the ability of Community Managers to solve the upcoming barrage of unanswered questions. They have proven to be extremely diligent at helping, for instance check this amazing assist, changing the thread to a different section of the forum:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/inventory-file-upload/1369615/11

I’d go as far as to say, “well done! You solved the problem!”

Now, as far as how to fill a file template… “oops, that’s a tough one…”

It’ll get old quickly.
We’ll all get a new distraction/website for our breaks. Sadly it won’t be likely to involve helping other sellers.

looks like we got the names of 2 of the new forum developers in that notice.

Until Amazon hires people with actual experience running an Amazon Store to be the new Mods the best case scenario is to let older forum members to answer questions. With all due respect Mods have shown day in and day out the lack of information on so many topics because they lack the experience needed to run a successful Amazon Store, not even considering that not even Amazon’s employees are following policy to the letter, which contributes more to the whole experience.

This “New Seller Community” where people with no experience is going to take advice from people with no experience will only make the whole chaos even bigger.

One part of Amazon tries to make the buying on Amazon experience better but at the same time another part of Amazon is sabotaging those efforts by leaving all new 3PS with no knowledge on how to do some basic things learning from more 3PS in the same level of expertise…

Happy Sales

What are the skills a successful Amazon seller needs?

An adequate number of products to sell.
A business plan which insures they can make money selling the product.
An understanding of the policies and mechanics of selling on the Amazon marketplace.
Understanding of order fulfillment, the options of how to handle fulfillment.
Customer service, the options for how to provide it, the restrictions Amazon places on how you provide it. Its cost including returns and refunds.
Inventory management.

There probably are others but it is a pretty extensive and challenging list.

The need for help is common among new sellers.

This forum helps by relying on the extensive experience of multiple contributing posters. It goes beyond the likely skills which are held by people whose job is online support. technical support or customer service.

I see no evidence that this forum will be able to provide new sellers help in all of these areas if all experienced sellers are barred from the New Sellers section, unless the posters who need help use other parts of the forum to get it.

I think that some limited intellectual rigor has been applied to solving the problems which have triggered this imminent new forum.