I’ve warned you about selling on Amazon, and how important knowing the rules is. Nothing brings that point into sharp relief quite like getting a notice from Amazon that you are in violation of their policies. That’s exactly what happened to me recently. Failing to comply with Amazon’s policies can mean serious penalties up to and including losing your seller account, which is, quite frankly a terrifying prospect for anyone who makes their living selling used books online.
In this case, the violation had to do with my confirmation emails. I am in the practice of sending out an email whenever I ship a book, just to let the customer know that their books are on their way. It’s good customer service and doesn’t take much time once you develop a boilerplate message to send out. The issue was that in the signature of my email was the URL of my own website.
Now, these emails are only sent after the transaction is complete. I would never try and divert a customer from buying a book I had listed on Amazon to buy it from my own site instead. That is pretty much Amazon’s cardinal sin and if you get caught doing it, you can pretty much expect instant expulsion. The way I justified what I was doing was that the customer had already bought the book and Amazon had already got their cut. What was wrong with letting the customer know I also had an independent site after the sale was complete?
A lot.