Yet another long story made short: Earlier this evening, I decided to contact Amazon (by phone, and actually got someone who spoke English) to cancel my account. I’ll believe they did that when I see it.
That sounds like a big mistake: if they close your account there could well be no possibility that you could get a download of your listings–and my understanding is that Amazon is the only place there is a list of your listings–except a few at Alibris–as you failed to regularly download your listings and don’t have an independent database of your listings.
Why would I need to download my inventory? All of it is within the confines of my home.
Yet another update: I may FINALLY have figured out what is/was going on, and be able to solve it. Hope so, anyway.
Good luck!
Fingers crossed and positive energy directed.
If you can, please share at some point what you learned about root causes. Perhaps for the edification of others that may end up in a similar predicament, or at least the morbid curiosity of technology types who love to hear technological disaster stories.
My Amazon account STILL hasn’t been resolved, and I’ve accepted that it may never be, but tonight, I FINALLY got an order from my new Biblio account. That felt really good.
Almost two months later, nothing has happened, I still can’t access my Amazon or Mturk accounts, I still get orders from Amazon, and I also realized that if I wanted them to stop charging my credit card $39.99 a month for the professional Amazon seller fee, I would have to cancel the card. Which I did.
In the meantime, maybe 1 customer in 50 has contacted me wanting to know why I haven’t shipped their item(s). This has me a bit concerned about how reliable Amazon is for most people, TBH. Anyway, when people do this, I tell them that if they send me the book’s Amazon purchase price in a check or money order, because I don’t do Paypal or Venmo, I will send them the book. Long story made short: A woman ordered a book from me and found out I was in the same city, and called me a couple days ago on my landline number, so we made arrangements to meet. She gave me a $10 bill this afternoon, and I gave her the book she wanted. And that was the first one.
A landline, and no Venmo or Paypal. Yeah, I’m a Luddite.
Update: I called customer service tonight on one of my credit cards for an unrelated issue, and found out what happened with my Amazon account, and it was this: A hacker tried to purchase Xbox gift cards with my account, so instead of telling me, they simply shut me down and locked me out.
I was able to get back in with some information I was given via an English-speaking customer service rep, and cancelled everything.
Amazon is big enough that they don’t need any given person’s business – but even so, one would think that they would have made some sort of effort to resolve the situation. But maybe I’m being foolish.
I agree. I’m just going to cyber-walk away.
So it took six months to get the real story out of them? That’s ridiculous.
After reading Kristi Coulter’s “Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career”, I got the impression that Amazon’s management is in such a state of chaos and flux it isn’t inclined (or able) to resolve much of anything.