Selling platforms suck......

While I've been unable to do anything miniaturely creative, I've been catching up with admin and doing the eleventy billion work-related things which I don't normally have time for.

One of the outstanding items on my To Do list from last year (yes....and the award for procrastination goes to...... ) is to list my book on Amazon.  It's been available on the website since its publication last November, and since then I've had a few fruitless attempts to create an Amazon listing.  Why do they make it so damn difficult?  I only want to list ONE ITEM, but for the past few days I've been jumping through endless hoops to no avail. 

My seller account was dormant, so I re-activated it.

The credit card associated with my seller account was invalid, so I updated it.

I had to re-verify who I was, where I was and that I had a boney fido business account, so I re-verified.

However, it still won't let me create a listing and I'm all out of patience.

Back in the day, I used Amazon to sell books from my own private collection.  The process, although lengthy, was fairly straightforward.  Ditto Ebay and Etsy, where I sold my own miniature creations.   Admittedly I haven't used any of those selling platforms for several years, but exactly when in the interim did they become so impenetrably difficult to negotiate?

However the main bugbear is the fees structure, which is positively labyrinthine, and seems designed solely to strip every last penny of profit from sellers.

Here's a handy pocket guide to Amazon selling fees.

For individual sellers, they charge a flat fee of 75p per item sold,  Plus a referral fee, which varies depending on what you're selling.  For books it's 15.3% which seems a lot.

If you use Amazon Fulfillment, where the company stores your inventory and despatches it for you, they charge for those services too. 

Then there's a myriad of other charges, depending on what additional services you want or need.

As an individual seller you can't set your own shipping rates, and on checking the actual costs of shipping to each zone , I discovered that I will be losing money on every book I post.  Which means I have to increase the cost of the book simply to break even.  I don't ever make a penny on packaging/shipping charges, but I certainly don't expect to be out of pocket. 

Which just makes you wonder how on earth you're supposed to make a profit!

In any case, my seller account is currently sulking and won't let me list anything, so I'll just have to wait till it decides what to do. 

Eye rolling emoji......

Any novelty caused by not being able to work pending my eyesight disparity being resolved has waned considerably.  With two weeks still to go until my post-op assessment, I'm in a no-man's-land of wonky vision which has rendered miniature work impossible.  I have tried, but apparently, decent binocular vision is mandatory for doing really tiny stuff.

Who knew?

The best I can manage at the moment is further sorting out my workroom, and planning/making lists.  Also trying to make inroads into my admin, which is a sisyphean task.  My filing system can best be described as 'chaotic', and I rarely ever get to the bottom of the teetering pile of papers atop my desk in the office.   So while actually making anything is out of the question, I've been trying to detox my desk and generally get rid of all the extraneous clutter.  I mean, who really needs THREE pots full of pens and pencils?

Also the planning thing.  Back in spring I thought I'd be well advanced on planning for the kits I want to make.  Of course then, I didn't know that I'd be out of commission for the best part of two months while the eye thing is sorted, so I've kind of faffed about, tinkering round the edges... making progress, slowly.  But it's already August, and I should have my pre-Christmas kits underway if they're going to be completed in time.

Then there's the website which needs a thorough tidy up and re-organisation.  I'm always blaming lack of time for tackling that, but suddenly, although I have oceans of the stuff, I'm constantly finding reasons not to do it.

Which is obviously simply not good enough.

So today I'm absolutely, definitely going to make a start.

*sigh*