36 HOURS INTO THE NEW YEAR AND AMAZON HITS MY LIST

Wow, I actually made it a day and a half into the new year before something
pissed me off.   In this case Amazon.com.  Guess I'm not the only one with
gripes against this mindless entity.

I have a couple of thousand vinyl LPs listed on Amazon.  All of them are
original pressings, as opposed to reissues.   And that's where the problem
starts.

Amazon apparently runs some sort of background algorithm that looks at pricing. 
If the software detects that your asking price is outside of normal boundaries,
the company disables the listing until such time as you adjust your price to
bring it back down to an "acceptable" price range.  The software apparently
can't tell the difference between an original and a reissued product.

Here's the email I got from the company:

Dear Seller,

We are contacting you because we have detected potential pricing errors in your
Amazon.com product listings. To avoid a potentially negative customer experience
caused by mispriced items, we have deactivated these listings.

These deactivated listings are marked in Manage Inventory with a Status of
"Inactive (Pricing Error)".

To reactivate your listings, click on "Fix Price Alerts" and then on "Potential
Pricing Error" on the left menu to:

- update  your offer price, or
- confirm your offer price by setting "Your minimum price" and "Your maximum
price" in the specified columns so that your offer price is within the minimum
and maximum price range. We will alert you in the future if your price falls
outside your price range. If you do not use the minimum and maximum price
settings, our systems will continue to use internal data to help detect
potential pricing errors.

If you have a Professional selling account, you can also use the Inventory
Loader file or the Price & Quantity file to update your prices as well as your
minimum and maximum prices. For more information, search in Seller Central Help
for the terms "Unblocking Your Listings", "Inventory Loader", and "Price and
Quantity".

If you have questions or need assistance, log in to your Seller Central account
and click the "Contact Seller Support" link at the bottom of the page. For
feedback about this pricing error program, please send an e-mail to listing-error-feedback@amazon.com.

Thank you for selling on Amazon,

Your Amazon Services Team

--------------- Listings with Potential Pricing Errors ---------------

Note: If you have more than 100 listings with potential pricing errors, only the
first 100 are listed here.

ASIN    SKU    TITLE    PRICE
B000VL1TYO    EV-1NOK-P13U    LACEWING [LP VINYL]    150.00
B001I3GMTQ    NX-2ALO-UHTD    Stereoequipe [Vinyl]    200.00
B002XDE4CW    P4-CHV7-E1NC    Ultimate Prophecy (Ogv) [Vinyl]    80.00


Out of curiosity I decded to see what was actually listed on Amazon for these
three items.

Again, my three are all original pressings.

Lacewing;  There are nine copies; all reissues ranging in price from $14.95 to
$23.72.  

Stereoequipe; There are four copies; all reissues ranging in price from $30 to
$48.99   The only original was mine. 

Ultimate Prophecy; one copy and it is a reissue with a price of $14.98. 

Again, in each case my listings were the only original copies.   Hard to believe
that Amazon would force a seller to lower their prices to match the lower price
of something that is inherently different.

Anyhow, I responded with comments trying to explain the differences between an
original and a reissue.  I'm thinking I wasted my time.

Happy New Year everyone.