Comic Cuts — 25 February 2022

Being a small business sucks sometimes, especially when you're at war with the biggest behemoth in the business world. I've sold through Amazon for many years, but recent changes have made me feel like telling them to fuck off.

They wouldn't even notice my tiny business disappearing any more than a beach would notice one grain of sand being carried away. My hope is that that grain would be jammed in the arse crack of Amazon, irritating every step that it took. The tiniest piece of grit making life literally a pain in the arse.

A while ago I was told that my seller rating had fallen below 95%. Now, this is important because if you drop too far or stay low for too long, they can dump you as a seller. This caught me by surprise because I haven't had a single problem with an Amazon order in all the years I've sold through them. Of the thousands of books I've shipped over the past decade, I've had a handful go astray, which I've usually replaced at my own cost. But with Amazon I have a 100% satisfaction rating with all books sent out promptly and not one has gone missing. I've had no complaints. Not one.

Yet my seller rating was down... and when I queried this I was told that it was because I was sending out my books the wrong way. I had always sent them by Royal Mail 2nd class. Now they wanted books to be tracked, which you can't do cheaply. They said there was an option to label the postage as "stamps/franking", so I did. And that worked for a couple of weeks before I got another message to say that my seller rating had, again, dropped below 95%.

This time their helpful help desk said that the stamps/franking option was for goods that cost below £5. As my books cost more than that, I needed to send them by a method that could be tracked. Twice. Now that rules out sending it "signed for"—where the recipient signs on delivery—which is an option offered by my local post office. Rather it must be posted 24 or 48 hour tracking, options that are only available online rather than through the post office.

I sell enough through Amazon for me not to cut off my nose to spite my face, so I took the plunge of buying a label printer at a cost of just shy of £100. This means that I can have the pleasure of printing my own labels. It also means that the usual £1.99 postage just jumped to £3.60. Plus the cost of the label, which is about 4p. Plus the cost in time.

And at the end of all that faffing around, I then can't post the book at our local post office. No, I have to post it at a Royal Mail Sorting Office, the nearest of which is in Colchester, a £4 bus journey away.

As I said before, I don't sell that many books through Amazon, but I do sell some and I'm not going to be taking a £5.45 hit per book for them. So you might be seeing the prices of my various titles listed on Amazon going up in the near future. Which, of course, means that Amazon's cut of the price will also increase, because they roll the cost of the book and the postage into one number that they then take a percentage of in fees.

And on Monday I got another message saying that my seller rating was down once again. This time because I haven't issued any VAT invoices to customers. Well, I'm not VAT registered and there's no VAT on books here in the UK, so why would I need to issue a VAT invoice? It's just more unnecessary paperwork. Since Brexit, postage costs have soared and I have to fill in customs declaration forms for parcels going out to Europe, where different countries charge different rates of VAT, and some charge reduced rates on books of varying amounts. My sales to Europe have pretty much dried up, so that's not a big problem, although the loss of sales might be in the long run. I might need to look at making some books available as ebooks or maybe doing stripped down versions in a 6x9" format that I can post  abroad more cheaply. Something to think about.

Thank you for listening. Other than that, I'm keeping busy with a big scanning job that has just come in. I'm trying to fit work on Action around it, but there's a lot of artwork needing to be cleaned up, so I think there might be a few late nights ahead.