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.