Suble but major change I recently come across on listings
I sell videogames mostly older/retro where every game will have listings with varying conditions. It used to be that buy box would only be for a condition of "very good" or better. Now it seems that even "acceptable" condition is now getting the buy box sometimes. What's going on with that? Usually "acceptable" condition typically means that it's going to be disc/cartridge/game only, so having that as the buy box when the pictures of course on the listing usually always show it coming with the case and what not is going to potentially cause a good amount of issues.
I can already see the influx of returns when customers get their games in a generic case or just a paper sleeve when they were expecting to at least get the original case with it. Even if the seller does post pictures or says that it'll be only the game, we all know that refund will be approved in half a second.
This comes into question, what/who is this change for? Certainly not for the customer(s) as this will undoubtedly cause confusion and frustration for them. Not sure how it would be good for sellers either, usually the games in "acceptable" condition are ones that have pretty low profit margins and having to pay for the return shipping on any of them usually results in a net loss.
1 reply
Seller_nRFmxiQg4EGrw
I don't sell video games, but do sell books, so still in the broader "Media" category. For books, "Acceptable" has always been able to get the BB if it's the lowest price (of course, many sellers selling "Acceptable" are not BB eligible, so it's not always the case).
But for the last week or two, the BB has been very weird; with almost no FBA offers getting the BB, which used to be the norm. I've even seen FBM get the BB when the FBA offer was cheaper (and in same condition).
For a few days, it seemed that the BB was factoring condition, so a $20 VG was getting the BB over a $10 Acceptable, but that seems to have changed and gone back to ignoring condition. It would appear that Amazon programmers are bored and are mucking around, and if they stopped counting condition for books, perhaps that carried over to Video games as well. Of course, this is all speculation, as Amazon will never tell us anything about the BB, but certainly, it's been acting up lately.
