Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams
Okay, let's break it down:
- $73.94 comes in
- $61.11 goes out
- $12.83 is left and has to cover:
- credit card fee ~2--2.5% --- at most $1.85, so they have
$10.98 (or more) of potential profit which merely has to cover the expense of running a transaction on a server and sending some e-mail and storing some data and serving up some web pages (trivial cost of operation folded into the balance of their budget), maybe a banking fee on the $61.11, &c.
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... running the servers themselves, spending countless man-hours developing the data models that effectively advertise the product, paying all their employees who do all the
other work that Amazon needs done (the marketplace is part of a broader business)...
Quote:
The merchantplace sales should be pretty much pure profit for Amazon for those sellers which don't pose problems (and even those expenses are minimal --- e-mail from a customer sales representative and maybe some chargebacks --- the onus is on the marketplace seller), so thus far, the only people making money on my book are:
- the printer (I don't mind, they worked hard)
- Amazon (annoying, and I wish there was an on-line service w/ better terms)
- the Abebooks reseller who has thus far convinced 3 people to pay his inflated prices when my copy was available for list price
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All those "trivial cost of operation folded into the balance of their budget" need to be paid off somehow, and the whole Amazon system is what pays for it. So Amazon already has the system, therefore you should be able to use it for free?
Perhaps you should start an online service with better terms. Oh, wait -- you'd have to build the infrastructure, and it would end up being
less-favorable terms.