Although I'm not necessarily fond of e-commerce giant Amazon, one of the reasons I have Alchemystones listed for sale in their "Amazon Handmade" area is the fact that I was hoping to piggy back on their extremely wide reach and the fact that a lot of people subscribe to the idea that "you can get everything on Amazon."
So why not Alchemy Stones?
Relative to how many items I have listed, I have to admit that I have had somewhat decent results compared to the nearly "blank" that I see everywhere else — eBay, Etsy, Facebook, etc. Which perhaps should serve as an encouragement for me to put some more items on Amazon.
But that's when we start to run into trouble. Amazon is also one of the most cumbersome and UNuser-friendly seller interfaces I have ever come across.
My reason for taking the time to sit down and even write about this right now is that I just sold an item there a few days ago and so I naturally had to figure out how to get the information about the stone, so I could find it and retrieve it from my stock boxes.
Sold! Yay!
I suppose — objectively speaking — that this is no real fault of Amazon's, because quite clearly the site is designed to accommodate mass market items where you sell hundreds of the same item, not 100 items of which there's only one each.
That said, certain information is almost impossible to find and poking around the seller site to get the answers I need is an almost labyrinthine nightmare.
For example, where are my proceeds from this sale?
Not said as in "pay me" but as in "how do I TRACK that?"
I eventually managed to find the actual transaction page, but on that page there are no links to anything else related to the transaction. What's more concerning is that there is no link back to the main landing page where you at least can find links to all the different features of the seller account.
After about 20 minutes of clicking randomly around I eventually figured out that the only way I could get back to the main seller dashboard was to log out of the account and log back in so I would end back on the front landing page.
Well, that's totally ridiculous!
Which gets me back to my reticence concerning my previous statement up there that perhaps I should list more items for sale on Amazon.
Listing things for sale is also a counterintuitive nightmare, especially when you have handmade items with information and attributes that you can't just pull from some generic catalog of, you know, "this is a standard AAA battery, that has a standard description that always applies no matter who you are and where you're located."
A quick estimate suggests — because I'm into numbers and geeky stuff like that — that listing one item for sale on Amazon takes a proximately 4 1/2 times longer than listing the corresponding item for sale on eBay or Etsy.
And what makes the whole thing kind of bothersome is the fact that every time I create a new product for sale it is a one time process; I'm not going to be able to just "restock" by adding a single digit like you would with a book, or a pair of shoes.
I can't help but think that one of the reasons why Amazon Handmade — although a cool feature — has never really taken off with the general public is because it's too difficult for sellers to list their wares.
Anyway, I'm going to have to think about this very carefully before I take a next step. I would really like to sell more stuff online and that's the allure here, particularly since my other businesses are all kind of in the toilet.
But how much time is it viable to give it?
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