We have temporarily suspended the ability to submit products or edit existing listings. You will be able to save these products in draft form and submit them when publishing resumes. We will provide an update here on Tuesday, December 12 regarding the status of new submissions and edits. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
12/12 Update: We will continue to pause through next week. Our next update will be by Tuesday, December 19. Thank you for your patience.
still waiting for the 12/19/17 update
I find it funny that one of the biggest companies in the world can't handle a t shirt business and now all of us have to suffer.
Agreed. If they were unwilling or unable to properly invest in the business — to shoulder the short-term costs of properly building out their capacity to meet demand at the time of the year that makes or breaks a lot of retail businesses — then they might as well not have bothered. At least, they should stop accepting new sellers and let attrition whittle down the ranks of active sellers until the demand and capacity equation stabilizes.
Well, throttling is probably going to strangle our holiday selling season anyway, so I guess it doesn't make any difference.... :(
Guess I was lucky to sneak a shirt in that was published and went live before the suspension. But I'm kinda bummed that I noticed a problem with the description that I'd like to edit. :(
Thanks for the communication and giving us a date to look at for the next announcement. Of course it's NOT exciting news, but I do appreciate the communication this year with us!
Well, I'm hoping that when the 4th Christmas comes around that Merch will have all these teething problems sorted out and that the new streamlined printing facilities will be able to cope with more output than even the most ambitious of us can envisage.
However, I wish that those in charge had taken notice and acted upon the ideal solution for Merch and sellers, which would have been a very simple software solution, to raise prices of all Merch products to reduce demand, rather than this dreadful throttling and upload cessation.
Appreciate the headsup. Will all the items currently stuck "in processing" go thru?
I am new, I know we have 90 days to to even get designs up. I am 2 days from that day and just went to upload mine and see this message. I uploaded it to draft like they said, but what happens to my account now? Will they see I did it one time??? I wonder????
Personally I think Merch has been doing a great job preparing for this in advance. My guess is their sales have been off the charts and Amazon wants to keep up with capacity, so things run smoothly. I agree with Ryan that thankfully we were given a heads-up about this in advance! Knowing this made us really crank work and fill our tier allotments.
One other point, it was cool that Merch tiered up lower tiers recently. And this freeze is temporary. So it'll be okay I'm sure. Cheers!!
You can be Pollyanna all you want. But if Merch had done a "great job" preparing for the holiday season, they would have no need to throttle, to restrict availability of colors and sizes, or even to restrict listing new items at this time of year. We sell novelty t-shirts. A lot of people buy them as holiday gifts, and we probably won't get their attention at any other point in the year because they're just not thinking about buying what we have. Merch is hiding our items at the time of year when most people are looking for them, because evidently — for the third year in a row — they weren't prepared to meet the demand for our products.
Think about it: Why did being associated with Amazon seem like such a great deal? Because of the exposure? Yes. But many of our products are now excluded from search, so that no one can find them unless we do the work of steering them there. Because Amazon has a reputation for understanding retail and logistics and executing well? Yes. But for the last three Christmas seasons, they have failed to put together enough capacity to meet demand. And many, if not most of us, are losing sales because of it. And Amazon is jobbing itself out of revenues from those sales that will not be made. How is that a "great job"?
Complaining about circumstances does not make things better. Welcome to life. Things happen. Quit playing victim and focus on something else.
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