EBAY, Amazon or both?

[froggy]

What about the copyright side of things, can you put copyright on the item you are listing, or is also a no no?

Yes you can use a copy write notice on your original designs. Amazon own the product listing NOT the product. My advice is sell on as many different selling platforms as suits your business. Major drawback with all selling platforms is the squeeze on your margins, more competition bigger the squeeze.
Not a great future in selling personalised mugs for example at £4/5.95 on ebay too many sellers who want to get their money back on their cheapo equipment and cant work out what actual overhead is...... grrrr ...........lol

[James990]

Um, what is NOTHS ?

[ICF]

Not On The High Street

[technick]

NOTHS is now oversaturated.

£200 set up plus 20% - very few mugs sold under £10 on there.

[pisquee]

We've been on NOTHS for a few months now, and have sales similar to Etsy coming in from it, about to relaunch back onto Folksy in the next few weeks. Gave up on Ebay and Amazon, but Amazon are interested in taking us on wholesale.

E2A - NOTHS is oversaturated in some product categories - best thing is to search it and look for product categories that aren't, we've got some products in oversaturated areas, and some that aren't.

The other thing to add about NOTHS is you can't just sign up and sell like other platforms - they've got to approve you as a seller, and then each product has to go through an approval process. The sign up fee is a lot less than it was a few years ago, although the commission has gone up to 25%, but that's still a better profit margin than wholesaling. It's certainly not a platform that will suit everyone - have a look at the site, and the dominant styles of products/design as well as how they are photographed.

[Smart Mart]

How are Amazon interested in you selling wholesale to them? You sell through them, they don't buy wholesale. Isn't that just like saying ebay would like to buy wholesale from you? or am i missing something?

[Andrew]

How are Amazon interested in you selling wholesale to them? You sell through them, they don't buy wholesale. Isn't that just like saying ebay would like to buy wholesale from you? or am i missing something?

Amazon sell direct to consumer and also allow other sellers to use their platform. If Amazon see a product the know or think will sell well then they buy the product in direct. They almost use their 3rd party sellers as test subjects to find the winners and lovers then back the right ones.

[pisquee]

Yes, as above, they'd buy wholesale from us, to sell themselves. The majority of our business is wholesale supply so this works well for how we operate.

[Lucifax]

Yes you can use a copy write notice on your original designs. Amazon own the product listing NOT the product. My advice is sell on as many different selling platforms as suits your business. Major drawback with all selling platforms is the squeeze on your margins, more competition bigger the squeeze.
Not a great future in selling personalised mugs for example at £4/5.95 on ebay too many sellers who want to get their money back on their cheapo equipment and cant work out what actual overhead is...... grrrr ...........lol

We recently had several designs stolen by Chinese sellers (I suspect a single manufacturer stole them and supplies several sellers), Amazon couldn't care less. Spoke to them on the phone and they say it's not their problem, even refusing to take down the offending listings despite us being able to prove ownership of the stolen graphics. I did some research and it seems a US court found Amazon not responsible for the listings of 3rd parties, so they really aren't interested in helping the little guys. All other platforms, ebay, etsy etc ....Even Alibaba removed listings for us after we also found them being pirated on there.

I really don't know how Amazon get away with this, they are providing the platform for the pirates to sell. Surely it's similar principal to Napster and Pirate Bay providing a platform for piracy and neither of those got away with it, whilst Amazon are actually profiting from piracy. Money talks I guess. Stolen designs are at epidemic proportions on Amazon now via the Chinese sellers. Artwork stolen via Zazzle which is a bummer as we do well on there with designs but have had to pull a lot of our listings just to stop them being nicked.

[GoonerGary]

I wouldn't worry about US law. Do the test purchase and stick at it. Open A-Z claims afterwards. I'm plagued with piracy, recently caught a guy and he got a nice letter from me.

Amazon.com have an alternative method for removing infringing material and that's for removing images. I had no hassle doing this compared to reporting trademark infringements!

"If your copyrighted image has been added to our catalogue without your consent, please complete the form below."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/infringement

If anyone has had success with Alibaba let me know the procedure. I only got some weirdly translated ambiguous email.