Amazon Update

[erastes]

I had a standard reply to my complaint to Amazon. Probably worded in the way it was because I went through Marketplace (being the only place I could find an email form)

 

They said:

I'm sorry about any misunderstandings regarding the listing of this item. In researching ASINs 0762435739 and 0762436581, I see these items are listed with a release date of April 13.  Because Amazon Marketplace sellers are not able to list items for pre-order on our web site, the item is currently ineligible for Amazon Marketplace selling. You may have seen the Sell Yours Here button earlier, before the publisher made any changes to the release date.

After April 13 has passed, you should be able to list these items.  Please try to create your listings again after the release date.

I hope that this information was helpful.

Of course I pointed out that it wasn’t at all helpful, had nothing to do with Marketplace, and that I didn’t wish to list these items. (you doofuses, I muttered under my breath) but at least now we have a dialogue and a “contact complaint number” – so I’ll keep pushing and see what they say.

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

For the record, there are a ton of e-mails and phone numbers for Amazon right here.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

I had a similar non-reply to my first inquiry, a slightly more dismissive non-reply (where 'non-reply' means that they did not actually reply to the question I asked - they replied to something else instead) to the second one, and this to my third:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

>From your e-mail, I understand your concern that you wish to have sales rank for this book.

Please note that as mentioned in the previous e-mail, we use sales rank to show how items in our catalog are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales for that particular item. Items are ranked within their product category only, so a CD ranked at Number 1 is the best-selling CD at Amazon.com, but may not be the overall best-selling item.

For further assistance regarding this matter, I would request you to contact your publisher.

I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction regarding this matter. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

We appreciate your business and hope to have the opportunity to serve you again in the future.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=fawwayef3478596547
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=fawwayef3478596547

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Saritha
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company

Which I think has to be the most ironic use of a tag line ever.
I've spent the morning altering my buy links on my websites to point at Barnes and Noble. The sales rank was my only reason for directing people at Amazon in the first place. If it's not there, neither am I.

[markprobst.livejournal.com]

Since I'm a publisher with an Amazon Advantage account I'm hoping to have better luck with an answer soon. I opened what in the Advantage program is called a "case log". As of yet, the case has not been assigned. I wouldn't expect to hear anything before Monday. Does anyone else have just a little nagging suspicion in the back of your mind that this isn't a glitch, but something more disturbing?

Every book listing has a blue-shaded section near the bottom of the screen called "feedback," only the Kindle titles have a link in that box "Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? Click here" When you click there it opens a complaint box and the drop-down boxes you could select shows the default complaint "This item contains pornographic content"

I don't know, I'm just kind of freaked out right now.

[angelabenedetti.livejournal.com]

So, wait, if you're selling a book with a sex scene in it -- which covers a boatload of het romances which can be bought at WalMart, supermarkets and drugstores -- someone could report it as pornographic?? That's insane! :(

I've been wondering whether someone at Amazon hasn't been targeting the gay and erotica books and stripping the ranking widget off them, but now I'm wondering whether some right-wing person or group hasn't been going through reporting all this horrible Gay Pornography. [snarl]

I'll be very interested to hear what reply you actually get from Amazon on this.

Angie

[markprobst.livejournal.com]

Angie,
I'll definitely let everyone know what kind of response I get out of them. Alex Beecroft's Persues' editor got a response saying that "False Colors" and "Transgressions" would have their rankings restored in a few days. It remains to be seen if that means all the recently disabled rankings will be restored or just those two. It may be that Amazon just intends to appease Perseus on this issue. I haven't officially blogged about this yet, because I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait for an official response, before I go ballistic.

Mark

[angelabenedetti.livejournal.com]

I agree on waiting until we get some sort of firm handle on what's going on and what Amazon is going to do about it. [nod] That's why I haven't posted about it either, but I'm practicing my parabolic orbits just in case. :/ If it turns out this is something they're doing to GLBT and Erotica books particularly (or to non-Kindle GLBT and Erotica, a possibility which just surfaced over in Alex's journal), I'll definitely have a few things to say about it. My online soapboxes might be fairly low, but I have eight of them -- plus my Romancing the Blog Column -- and I'm willing to use every one of them for this if Amazon turns out to actually be that hypocritical. :/

Angie, waiting for now