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Wondering if dropshipping or even RA is even viable any longer on amazon...
 

Just from my own experience, it may not even be worth it anymore. Like someone said on this forum before somewhere, amazon will catch you sooner or later. And better off sooner than later tbh. That way you havent built in the success to your potential income.

Things ive noticed over the last 2 years(RA and dropshipping)...
1. Receipts are not invoices and wont be accepted when amazon asks for them. Account will be suspended...
2. Amazon does not care if your kid has cancer and arbitrage is the only way to cover their medical treatments, and in fact, they may enjoy taking potential income away from you. Account will be suspended...
3. They cast very wide nets with their ID verifications and dont care if innocents get caught up in it. Account will be suspended...
4. Even if you happen to be the only seller of an item, if it is priced higher than other retailers, they will hide your listing and give you a pricing error message and possibly hit your seller metrics at least until you lower the price to match other retailers. Then there will little to no profit anyway.
5. Hell, you cant even get buy box eligibility till you sell numerous items, have several positive reviews, no negative account health dings, and months of selling experience. In addition, your price has to be competitive, which means the lowest, and that means in comparison to other sellers on the same asin and other retailer prices. How the F are you gonna pull that off?
6. Even if you are on the up and up and following their policies to the letter, you can still get caught up in a mass suspension net. Then you will have to cough up no less than $5000 for a lawyer to get your account and the funds back anyway. And you wont get any sympathy from amazon.
I hope these tactics bite amazon in the ass and they are forced to ease up, but until then, the only way to make any profit on amazon may be to develop a private label once in a lifetime product or wholesale, but i imagine the competition is high with those products too...

Amazon is always evolving it seems. Ive learned alot over the last few years and it has come at the expense of my selling accounts. But once i heard about dropshipping and got a taste of it, i was hooked. Then they changed the rules and now i guess im out of luck.
Their algorithms are nasa level and the technology is what suspends the accounts, not an actual person. Even if you are lucky enough to talk to a human from Bangladesh or wherever they outsource CS, it wont matter bc they all read a script and aren't allowed to use human judgement or even common sense anyway.

I may try to wait it out hoping it gets less restrictive and they stop forcing sellers to match the cheap prices at walmart, etc.
who knows?

Re: Wondering if dropshipping or even RA is even viable any longer on amazon...
 

You are not wrong.

I'd say use RA & OA to try and learn the ropes and then hopefully shift into a more feasible model such as wholesale.