Thinking of starting an Amazon Store? Don't waste your time!!

We've only been on Amazon for like 6 months and we have kept everyone happy until now. We ship Amazon out first before our own websites, etc. We shipped a package FedEx 2Day and it was 1 day late. Not our fault. We shipped it right away and it was FedEx that made the mistake. Anyway that made it where we lost "Premium Shipping Eligibility" and your support people said they couldn't remove it. It was not our fault. I was going to grow our brand on here, but I see I have wasted my time. Thankfully we didn't build out a whole store on here yet, but I'm still angry we wasted this much time on a company that is greedy and doesn't care about the seller at all. There was no OTDR protection from Amazon Buy shipping so it wouldn't have mattered where the label was purchased and we shipped the same method on our own account - FedEx 2 Day. So, they punish us and I'm just done. I don't really want to invest more energy into a one-way relationship where we do the work, you take a huge chunk and then screw us at every turn! I have my own websites and we'll just pay Google for ads on there and invest on our own. Besides, Amazon competes with my own Google ads for our business on our own stores, so that's another reason.

I just wish they would be decent about things. The support line is a joke. The first guy didn't even understand about the whole "Premium Shipping Eligibility" thing and another one had me on hold for 35 minutes (in 3 or 4 separate hold sessions) only to tell me that there was nothing they could do for me.

One rep told me that we had to buy our Fedex 2Day labels through Veeqo, but we already have ShipStation and can buy our labels through there. I don't know where they find these support people, but none of them could really get the story straight. I had to call back and the next rep was so hard to understand because she must have had the microphone in her mouth while speaking. I finally got her to back the microphone off from her face, at which point I could finally understand her better.

My advice: RUN, RUN, RUN.... Seriously, just pump your own websites. We have 4 sites we sell on. I'm going to pump the money we would have spent on Amazon into our Google ads and other places like internet forums and just either shut down Amazon or at a minimum not add anything or care about what they think of us. We worked so hard and have great feedback, but I'm just done with the one sided greed from them.

Selling on your own website has a few great advantages.

1) MUCH higher profit margin

2) We're not paying a company to compete with us

3) Don't have to wake up one day and find out we're somehow delisted/deranked/punished in some way

4) Businesses that we ACTUALLY own and can sell some day. On AZ and Ebay you don't own anything.... they own you and can shut you down and lock you out any time they want.

5) Less stress

NOTE: I found with one of our own websites already that when we pumped the money we used to spend on Ebay into advertising we make more money by far than we did paying 13% to Ebay. Same thing could be with Amazon. Sure, sales might be lower, but the margins are much higher.

I sure hope Amazon is broken up. Google and AZ are monopolies and they're just downright abusive to the seller. It's all about a money grab. If you go through their Amazon Buy they will forgive you being late on a package, but they charge you like 25% more than our own account. It's just unbridled greed. I'm a capitalist, but they're bad for America at this point.