I just got this valuable tip from a reader. Amazon closed her listing because she included the ISBN in the description:
I woke up this morning to an email from Amazon saying I had violated their listing rules and they had dropped one of my listings. Since I had never had that happen in over four years, and I was confused. Here is the listing:
Condition: Used – Very Good
Comments: No dj. 039 953 2382. Shelf wear.
When the seller called and spoke to a customer-service rep, the mystery was solved. Amazon, in its infinite wisdom, determined that the ISBN was actually a telephone number, beckoning customers to phone in their order and circumvent the Marketplace commission. Maybe Amazon should have tried calling that number before judging the seller guilty and imposing the sentence …
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7 Comments
Bitter?… table for one? Perhaps the seller could have identified the number as an ISBN? Just a thought,
Yes, this seller seems to be complaining for the sake of complaining. The number does look something like a phone number since it is typed up with weird spacing.
If the ISBN is correct for the listing details it is redundant. If it is not, the item is listed in the wrong place and should be removed.
I agree with the two anonymous comments — why does the ISBN have to be in the listing, and if it is, for whatever reason, why wasn’t it identified as such?
Lots of dealers are multi-venue, and basically upload the same listings to all sites–so it could be the ISBN is there because of the needs of another site or the dealer’s own website. While I don’t have this problem I have the reverse–Amazon BASIN numbers show up in my ABEbooks results for this reason.
One of the anonymouses asked why there might be a need to have an ISBN in the description anyway. A number of the Amazon catalog items have Amazon’s pseudo-ISBNs when the books do, in fact, have *real* ISBNs. By including the real ISBN in the description, the seller hopes that a search someone makes by ISBN will pull up the seller’s listing. (IMHO, this is an area that Amazon also needs to clean up when they start purging multiple faked ISBNs.)
I search on ISBNs all the time – it’s a useful way of filtering out the irrelevant search results. I think in this case, it should have been identified as such, though.
I have several friends who work at Amazon, and I’m doubtful that a phone call had anything to do with your item being delisted.
It’s a computer program that scans the listings – it sends out notices and delists sellers all the time without any human interaction. A human might have called that phone number, but the computer would not.
The worst part of this whole thing is that you can bring in $100k for Amazon in a year, and that computer program will still delist you for having an illegal book description with something as dumb as this on a single book. The program doesn’t take into account anything about how much business you bring in, or how long you’ve been selling, etc. Commit this error for too long (i.e. 6 months), and you’ll be delisted.
Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything
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Ryan
Used Is Better (formerly The BookHauler before we learned this lesson the hard way).