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I recently had a bad experience with an Amazon Marketplace seller. They had offered a set of out-of-print music CDs for about a third of the usual going price, so I jumped on it. A couple of days after I placed the order, the seller e-mailed me that they didn't have the item in stock and I should cancel the order. It didn't make sense to me that I should be the one to cancel--why couldn't they just do it? I had a suspicion that perhaps they had made a pricing mistake, and that's why they wanted me to cancel so they could re-list at a higher price. So I didn't cancel, and then a few days later I got an e-mail from Amazon saying the item had shipped, and I figured, OK, all is well. And then another e-mail from the seller again telling me to cancel, which I don't believe I would have been able to do even if I wanted to, because Amazon was showing it had bee shipped.
The delivery window on the item was ridiculously long (even though it was not an international seller), and meanwhile my credit card was charged and payment was almost due, so I finally wrote to the seller to ask what the heck was going on. They then reversed the charge.
I don't know what kind of crazy game they were playing, but I did some research on them and found that they've done this sort of thing before, under various names. However, they also have a lot of happy customers. I don't know if it's just some stupidity and inefficiency on their part, or if there's some way they're profiting from fake listings.
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