Selling Lego on Amazon.com

[pharmjod]

They haven't done a selling requirement for fbm for several years now. They usually block some lego skus from being sold across a big section of sellers, but never the whole brand. You can always try to get ungated again. 

[landphieran]

This may be dramatic but the writing is on the wall for small sellers. Amazon has an underlying performance platform that is definitely used for gating and buy box (probably other area's as well). It has also been used in an obvious way with metric thresholds on our accounts. They have increased fee's across the board and now have low volume shipping fee's and low volume listing/warehouse fee's. (FBA specifically).

Fundamentally they only want very high volume, accurate, simple shipments being received through FBA. They want low volume and mixed stuff going through FBM or elsewhere. I'd venture to guess these inbound shipping costs are going to continue to get more punishing.

Think about how you are operating and figure out a way to fit the mold.

[gmpirate]

13 hours ago, pete411 said:

I’ve just never been blocked from FBA during 4th quarter which has me worried. I thought the holiday blocks were just for FBM.

You never received an email?  Been a long time, but I remember years ago Amazon sending warnings to get a certain amount of sales in.

[Bricklectic]

[pete411]

On 10/29/2024 at 11:49 PM, gmpirate said:

You never received an email?  Been a long time, but I remember years ago Amazon sending warnings to get a certain amount of sales in.

Nope. Never received an email about losing Lego selling privileges. I was getting a shipment together and all of the sudden, I check my skus and I see the get approval button on all of them. 

[redcell]

1 hour ago, pete411 said:

Nope. Never received an email about losing Lego selling privileges. I was getting a shipment together and all of the sudden, I check my skus and I see the get approval button on all of them. 

Do you have the actual option to apply for approval or does it say that they’re not accepting applications at this time? 

[exciter1]

2 hours ago, pete411 said:

Nope. Never received an email about losing Lego selling privileges. I was getting a shipment together and all of the sudden, I check my skus and I see the get approval button on all of them. 

Does your account health rating drop to a negative rating when you are inactive?

[landphieran]

8 hours ago, exciter1 said:

Does your account health rating drop to a negative rating when you are inactive?

No, I was inactive for almost 8 months and never had any issues. I do have a professional seller plan, if that makes a difference.

[Brick625]

2 minutes ago, landphieran said:

No, I was inactive for almost 8 months and never had any issues. I do have a professional seller plan, if that makes a difference.

Same, was inactive for 4 months 

[exciter1]

8 minutes ago, landphieran said:

No, I was inactive for almost 8 months and never had any issues. I do have a professional seller plan, if that makes a difference.

OK, I just wondered if your health status dropped with inactivity.

[Brick625]

1 minute ago, exciter1 said:

OK, I just wondered if your health status dropped with inactivity.

The health score has been perfect throughout that time, both before and now.

[Bold-Arrow]

It is "normal” that long periods of inactivity will lead to a “reset” of sorts where your account is considered brand new and you need to start from the beginning with ID verification and updating 

[brunoros1]

I will miss selling legos on Amazon. I will miss this chat. But it is time to turn the page. It has been fun. Started selling legos on an Amazon in 2016, got grand fathered. Made a ton of profit during Covid. But since then it has not been the same. Too many sellers, fees skyrocketed, more and more restrictions on sets for the holidays. So this year I stopped buying inventory and paid off all my business debts. I sold 25 k$ up until April and then stopped. Far cry from the 200 k$ + I sold during Covid. Frankly I am just tired of it. I still have tons of inventory but it is all profit from there. Anyhow, like many of you guys Amazon just removed my ability to list legos within a day (ridiculous) and there is no option to get it back. It is ok. I am not going to fight it. I will take my time to sell what I have left. My eBay account has good feedback and I am not looking for profit anymore. I have made my money with Amazon. Good luck for all you guys who still continue with these guys. My respect. It is not peach and cream.


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[skinsfan0521]

If any of you who aren't able to sell in Amazon anymore are looking to move your inventory, send me a message and we can see if we can work something out. I've done some smaller and some larger deals with other members here in the past. 

[Mark Twain]

I haven’t sold anything since May, but kept account open. I went to NYC early this month and turned on vacation mode and forgot to turn it off. 10 days later and I had to reverify all my info. Still have Lego and other products approved. Oddly enough I also got some spam snail mail from someone claiming they were buying dormant FBA accounts for $1000-$3000.


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[freakchem]

I didn't follow Amazon policy closely this year, but in the past several years, they had the rule that you need to fulfill a certain amount of orders before holiday seasons in order to be admitted to sell on Amazon for the 4th quarter. I don't remember it included FBA or not, but definitely FBM.  

[pharmjod]

That hasn't been a thing for several years now.

 

Unfortunately. 

Edited November 1 by pharmjod

[Bricklectic]

15 hours ago, brunoros1 said:

 Anyhow, like many of you guys Amazon just removed my ability to list legos within a day (ridiculous) and there is no option to get it back. 
 

No way to sugarcoat it, that truly sucks.

But are you saying you got a notification out of the blue? Or similar to others here, were you inactive for a period of time and then got some sort of message when reactivating.

I posted recently a FUNKO message sellers got that rendered them inable to sell funkos effective immediately pretty much. I have a friend that sells designer shoes that mentioned yesterday that Amazon sent him a similar letter. Although, they did allow him to sell out his stock till year end.

Edited November 1 by Bricklectic

[brunoros1]

No way to sugarcoat it, that truly sucks.
But are you saying you got a notification out of the blue? Or similar to others here, were you inactive for a period of time and then got some sort of message when reactivating.
I posted recently a FUNKO message sellers got that rendered them inable to sell funkos effective immediately pretty much. I have a friend that sells designer shoes that mentioned yesterday that Amazon sent him a similar letter. Although, they did allow him to sell out his stock till year end.

I think the bottom line here is that as an amazon 3P seller these days one must ship and sell constantly. This wasn’t for me anymore and so Amazon put me out of my misery.


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[pete411]

On 10/31/2024 at 3:03 AM, redcell said:

Do you have the actual option to apply for approval or does it say that they’re not accepting applications at this time? 

When I click on Get Approval for all of my listings, I get the not accepting sellers for this brand message. I did have to renew my seller information earlier in the year but after I got that, I was still ok to sell. All of my listings got flipped to approval required 3 weeks ago. My seller account reset was 3 months ago.

[pete411]

On 10/31/2024 at 4:40 PM, brunoros1 said:

I will miss selling legos on Amazon. I will miss this chat. But it is time to turn the page. It has been fun. Started selling legos on an Amazon in 2016, got grand fathered. Made a ton of profit during Covid. But since then it has not been the same. Too many sellers, fees skyrocketed, more and more restrictions on sets for the holidays. So this year I stopped buying inventory and paid off all my business debts. I sold 25 k$ up until April and then stopped. Far cry from the 200 k$ + I sold during Covid. Frankly I am just tired of it. I still have tons of inventory but it is all profit from there. Anyhow, like many of you guys Amazon just removed my ability to list legos within a day (ridiculous) and there is no option to get it back. It is ok. I am not going to fight it. I will take my time to sell what I have left. My eBay account has good feedback and I am not looking for profit anymore. I have made my money with Amazon. Good luck for all you guys who still continue with these guys. My respect. It is not peach and cream.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It was great while it lasted brother. I’m right with you out the door. Too much stress with declining sales and Amazon constantly adding hurdles along the way. You would think they’d value a seller with 100’s on thousands of dollars in sales but we’re really just small potatoes to them. Time to find a new side hustle that doesn’t involve Amazon.

[pete411]

On 10/31/2024 at 6:36 PM, skinsfan0521 said:

If any of you who aren't able to sell in Amazon anymore are looking to move your inventory, send me a message and we can see if we can work something out. I've done some smaller and some larger deals with other members here in the past. 

I might take you up on this on my smaller sets that don’t make sense selling on other platforms. Let me know the details.

[skinsfan0521]

1 hour ago, pete411 said:

I might take you up on this on my smaller sets that don’t make sense selling on other platforms. Let me know the details.

Send me a message with what you're looking to move. 

[Tonka858]

On 11/1/2024 at 7:10 AM, freakchem said:

I didn't follow Amazon policy closely this year, but in the past several years, they had the rule that you need to fulfill a certain amount of orders before holiday seasons in order to be admitted to sell on Amazon for the 4th quarter. I don't remember it included FBA or not, but definitely FBM.  

i wonder if that still applies,Seems like something amazon would do just before xmas. 

[legorunner]

Some data as we search for rhyme or reason: I'm definitely a small time player. I sold a little bit in January and February and one last set in March. I didn't send sets in again until early late July or early August, but I did log into my account every now and then to create new FBA listings - not sure if that helped with anything. I've been selling stuff since August and have had no trouble with my account (for now). 

Looking at 2025, I guess I'll make sure to get some inventory in to fill that mid point in the year and make sure I'm consistently making a few sales each month. 

All and all I've scaled back purchases this year, and the experience some of you have had has just further cemented that choice in my mind. I'm sorry for those of you who lost selling abilities, thats a bummer. It feels inevitable at this point but I'll still be disappointed when it happens. Hopefully you get them back after Q4!