Fun with Amazon Top Out-Of-Stock Products & Buyers Waiting reports

Bookselling can be drudgery. Selling used books online is dirty, backbreaking work. But it has its moments. I’ve had a lot of fun selling books on Amazon.

No doubt one of the most entertaining parts of the process used to be finding an obscure book with a high-dollar pending “pre-order” waiting on Amazon.

Nailing a pre-order was like hitting the lottery. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen these.

If you haven’t been around long, here’s how it worked: Sometimes a book is in such high demand — and, simultaneously, is in short supply — that there are waiting, “pending orders” on Amazon. When there are no copies available, over by the “sell yours here” button, there’s a link for “order it used.” That’s where waiting buyers place their pre-orders. Every day, 2,000 to 3,000 buyers place their bids, hoping that a seller will come along with an available copy. Buyers indicate the title, price and condition they’re willing to accept.

Every month, I used to stumble onto two or three books that produced the orange BUYERS WAITING! flag. Right after you set the condition, you get the notice, and Amazon would show you the average pending pre-order price, like this:

Average pending pre-order price (based on your condition) $80.

But $80 wasn’t necessarily the limit. You could price your item at double the pre-order price, and still get the sale sometimes. It all depended on how many buyers there were.

When everyone got switched to “Seller Central” a while back, the Buyers Waiting feature quit working. The big question: Was it a glitch, or did Amazon kill it on purpose? We have our answer now — Buyers Waiting is dead, and it’s not coming back.

Recently, as a poor substitute for Buyers Waiting, Amazon has been sending e-mails to its sellers like this one I received yesterday:

FROM: Amazon Selling Coach <amazon-selling-coach@amazon.com>

Amazon.com Top Out-Of-Stock Products Report

We regularly review the products our customers look for on our website. The products listed below are the top 50 products in the Books category that customers were interested in during the last month, but are currently unable to purchase because there was no available inventory from any sellers as of April 26, 2010. Because you’ve listed products similar to those on the list, we thought you might like to know that buyers are interested in these specific products.

That’s just the beginning, there’s always a total of 50 items on the list. I’m not sure if every seller receives an identical list. (Please a comment at the bottom to let me know if you got the same list.)

When you click on the sell button at these product pages, you don’t get the “Buyers Waiting” flag. So, mistakenly, I figured this meant Amazon had totally done away with Buyers Waiting. But I was wrong, there’s even a fairly new Buyers Waiting Help page. Not only that, the Preorder report download page still works! (You’ve got to be a Pro-Merchant to log in there). If you sort the report by the highest dollar value, you’ll notice it includes none of the dreck Amazon’s ” Selling Coach” includes in the Out-of-Stock report.

And now, (drum roll, please) the top bids in the Buyer’s Waiting report:

Note the big bucks buyers are waiting to pay, yet Amazon’s keeping this gold mine a secret! The Out-Of-Stock list is all about volume, not value. There are buyers waiting, but that’s not the stuff they’re willing to pay big bucks for.

Are you aggravated yet? There’s more.

The Amazon seller ThruTheLookingGlass asked Seller Support to clarify, and here’s the response:

From: Amazon Seller Support (seller.service05@amazon.com)

Please note that we have dis-continued the “buyer waiting” feature, and we have now changed our pre-order processing process.

Like previously mentioned, all of our Amazon Marketplace sellers are eligible to fulfill pre-orders for hard-to-find and out-of-stock items that have already been released.

But, now, you will not find the “buyer waiting” feature anymore. The matching of sellers listings to the requirement of buyers is now automatically done by our system.

We have adopted this change in the interest of better customer satisfaction. Instead of keeping buyers waiting for sellers to acknowledge the order and process it, we have now automated the system. Our system now automatically calculates the buyers requirement and matches it from available seller’s offers. The order is processed for the closest seller listing match for the item. Sellers can access their pre-orders by downloading the pre-order report from the following page;

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/SDPSupport/preorder-report-US.html

This process gives buyers the following advantages;

1. Faster order processing
2. Better matching of the buyers requirement to the offering of the seller for the product.

As you may know, Amazon is a customer centric organization, we have adopted this change to better facilitate the buyer to make purchases on Amazon.com with increased confidence.

We do understand your concern about the discontinued “buyer waiting” feature and will forward your comments and feedback to the appropriate department for consideration. Your feedback is valuable to us and we welcome suggestions from our sellers.

We thank you for your understanding and for selling on Amazon.com.

Best regards,
Amazon.com Seller Support

Pardon my French, but that’s the biggest, stinking pile of BS I’ve ever run into. They crippled one of their best features, and their explanation is …”automatic … faster processing … customer satisfaction … ” Fine, except for one little thing — IT DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE!!!!!!!

Memo to Amazon: When your sellers make money, you make money.

I’m unclear whether Buyers Waiting data is still available on third-party scouting tools like ScoutPal and ASellerTool. My guess is no. But why not? If Amazon is going to make the reports available on their Web site, why hide it from people scouting books?

And here’s how sellers really get shafted on this: As ThruTheLookingGlass stated so well in their letter to Seller Support:

The buyer waiting message is now missing during the sellers’ listing process. As a seller I found it very helpful to see this message while putting an item for sale as it greatly helped me to find a fair price for the item. It is upsetting to think that I might choose a price of $30 for an item while there is a buyer waiting to purchase that same item for $25. If I had that information available to me, I could choose whether to receive a quick sale and fulfill a buyer’s order for that item or ignore it and set my own price. Often I chose to fulfill the buyer’s order even if it meant pricing my item for slightly less than I initially would, which results in a happy customer.

I am aware of the availability of the “Pre-Order Reports” and appreciate having access to this helpful tool. However, the absence of this vital information in the two places it most needs to be: while I am shopping and choosing whether or not to buy and item to resell through Amazon, or while I am determining a price for an item I am selling; is hurtful to both customers and sellers. I would love to put a rare item into the hands of your customers who are patiently waiting to make their purchase, but I rely on Amazon to offer its sellers the appropriate tools to do so.

Related posts:

1. What book buyers want: Amazon “buyers waiting” pre-orders
2. Q&A: Where does Amazon’s ‘Buyers Waiting’ prices come from?