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I hope this gets challenged soon. This seems so clearly a violation of sellers ability to control their own shops, marketing and images.

Yeah. To that point, this also makes it seem like we are in a partnership with Amazon and we very much are not.

What? How? I mean, who fulfils the order? Is it an upstream Shopify thing or something like that?

So, right now -best I can figure- is Amazon is directing shoppers to our site. Or, telling customers to use the Amazon AI to buy it for them.

How does that work? Does ordering through Amazon make a proxy sale or something?

I don’t know exactly. Best I can figure - right now - is they just clone our shop in Amazons app and direct customers to our site. Or allow their customers to let the AI buy it for them. I don’t know how it looks on the backend.

Why is this a problem? You’d think we’d want wider distribution, right? Sure. But we want to control where our stuff is for sale. We sell a lot of limited edition art. What if Amazon’s search didn’t reflect that it’s a Ltd edition and oversells? Then I have to deal with one of the worst

Creatures in the ecommerce world - a pissed off Amazon shopper. If I wanted to sell stuff on Amazon, I’d have asked to set up an Amazon shop. I didn’t. The fact that Amazon feels like it has a right to our products without our input feels so violating.

This feels exactly like those restaurants who found out they were listed on all kinds of delivery websites without their knowledge. Their customers invariably got terrible deals and service, and thought it was the restaurant's fault.

Adding to this: we have spent the better part of two decades building Monkey Minion. Without Amazon. I don’t know if it’s paternalism, entitlement or something worse that makes Amazon think this is a good idea, but it’s not. I opted not to list our products on Amazon a long time ago. I could have

This is so insidious, this is basically a megacorp that's engaging in drop shipping behavior and trying to take a cut from small businesses Surely this is grounds for a lawsuit right???? How is this not illegal

I’ve been seeing this happening to a lot of artists with Shopify shops. Supposedly you can opt out by emailing branddirect@amazon.com but no confirmation if it works or not.

It actively listed a sold out item for me

Fuckers.

This is insanely messed up. Can you raise a stink and get delisted?

Working on that. After some digging, I found the opt out email. Shockingly, it wasn’t right up front and was buried in some small text under a couple of links.

I haven’t seen any non shopify users yet and Amazon/shopify had a deal for the past several years. This is disgusting but shopify has questions to answer to as well

Yeah, I’m gonna have to figure out how to contact Shopify about this. There’s been no warning or updates about this and nothing in our dashboard sales channels mentions Amazon.

fyi they tried to scrape one of my products from my BigCartel shop so they are definitely trying to hit other platforms. But it didn't have the image and wasn't purchasable, only the title and details and my shop name. I contacted both Amazon and BigCartel about it.

My theory is Amazon is trying to become the “Google of buying shit” and scraping and indexing databases of ecommerce sites.

Dear God I cannot imagine the logistical NIGHTMARE. But also shit like this is why, if I find a product I want on Amazon, I try to find the actual business to order from. Still comes from Amazon half the time, but usually at a MUCH better pricepoint, tbh.