I have been an Amazon customer since the beginning. I used to be able to sell my used books and CDs by going to the item listing and clicking a button "Have One To Sell" and uploading the info. Now I need to apply for permission, and am being directed to provide an invoice from the publisher for a purchase of at least 10 items? Is Amazon trying to eliminate the ability of private individuals to sell used items? Am I missing something? I just want to sell my old books like I used to so easily. Amazon is driving me away every day, now they want me to pay more money to get rid of commercials on Prime? Just stop it. You've gotten so big you don't seem to care about the individual anymore.

Amazon FBA is just costing me money - not making any profit with the massive fees. Just when I think I'm going to break even, there's an increase in inventory storage fees, or a return. I'm ready to cut my losses. First choice would be to try and sell it on another platform, but as I live in Africa it is very difficult.

The other is to just get my inventory removed - but I don't know what to do with it - it will cost too much to ship it here. And I live in a country with 2 mill people - not going to get a lot of sales here...

Any advice?

I feel like this is not going to be news to anyone, but I'm going to say it so that the feedback is public:

1. My account gets "deactivated for inactivity" about once a month despite me going through several tabs on my dashboard checking on my things at least once a day. In fact, you can still go through several pages that look fine before you suddenly hit a page that says that your account is deactivated. It is easy to not notice for days. It is just one example of how Seller Central does not work well, and why sellers say that they feel like Amazon wants them to quit. Despite sellers' activity, the platform deactivates them randomly and without notice, and makes it a chore to go through the reactivation steps and wait several days, losing business, for the shop to be visible again. It made it so easy for me to just let go.

2. When I joined, it was so difficult to set up the store. Listing forms full of irrelevant and confusing mandatory fields. Forms that don't show any warnings but don't work, and the answer from support is typically "give it a couple of days and it will start working." How can you seriously operate in 2025 with a platform where everything seems to be held together by chance and strong word one step away from crashing?

3. Support associates who respond in chats don't have answers and rush to close the conversation.

4. When I paid for premium support, my representative never replied to my email. He called me once to assure me that my open support tickets will get a response. I got no help to review the shop and help me market my products better. My rating for the premium seller support is 0/10.

5. Seller forums are full of sellers who feel defeated.

I don't know how much money Amazon received from me in premium fees. Notably, I can't find this information on Seller Central. I would say, a couple hundred dollars. That's the cost of the lesson I learned. As a businessman, I can't imagine why Amazon prefers to take this small cut and lose a seller to building an efficient platform where sellers thrive, to earn commissions in perpetuity. The overwhelming feeling is that Amazon is infiltrated by employees and contractors who learned how to manipulate the system to earn their salary while doing as little as possible, and these people have no motivation or incentive to help sellers. If there is anyone who is not indifferent about seller success, it is apparent that they are not listening on this forum, they don't use Seller Central, and they don't look at support tickets. In fact, when I reached out to a couple of Amazon executives with titles in Seller Experience on LinkedIn, you can guess that none of them gave a flying duck. The rot is widespread. Throughout my experience, I met two Amazon associates who genuinely helped. It was difficult to find such people, and a matter of luck that a business cannot reliably build on.

Amazon made it very easy for me to quit selling on Amazon. In fact, it is the only thing in my entire experience as an Amazon seller that seems to be intentionally made easy for me. Process that. This marketplace has become an Aliexpress extension.