Amazon GLitch AOB down for the umteenth time.

Well, title says it all–I can quit AOB, and plan on it–they used to send out e-mails when shit happened, now they don’t say anything and just hope that their users were offline at the time they went down. Seriously for the past 2 years, Communication at AOB sucks. I float better than most because I am computer savy–it’s really the outages that seem to happen once a month or so, with no explanation whatsoever that frustrate the HELL out of me–I mean, they don’t even tell you if the problem was fixed–or if perhaps it is just a regular maint. thing that they do. They don’t even bother to state if the problem is just front end and orders are getting pulled from all venues–or if it affects the back end too. There are other companies that do what AOB does–and they communicate better-it will be worth the extra money a month for that.

I mean I went to work all day–and still no message on their forums, or anywhere that I can find about what happened.  What am I supposed to do?  Start a ticket?  Ask them what the hell is wrong with their site?  I should be the one to go out of my way to type a ticket to them that they might answer with any kind of useful information? Instead of the company contacting it’s customers?  Hello?  Asellertool sends me e-mails all the time, Scout Pal used too. . . I’ve also recieved some e-mails from ALibris in the past year.

And also, How many of us are there?  1000?  Should we all start tickets?  That seems like a waste of AOB’s time to reply to everyone on an individual basis.  I’ll stick to my guns : They don’t post because they don’t want people who didn’t happen to try and use AOB in the Wee hours last night to know what was going on.

However, I cannot quit Amazon, only work around their crazy glitchdom.

Behold the Week of Glitchdom AMAZON, HALF-And AOB bitching.

I’ll start off with the big Glitch first. AMAZON.

Amazon is doing something that has prevented 3rd party services and even individuals from pulling order reports on consistent, timely basis for about 2 days now. It is aggravating. I’ve had a stellar 2 days of sales and have had to hand delete all my Amazon sales. OF COURSE I am not Home 24/7 so this doesn’t work out good for me.

The most aggravating thing in all of this, is that AOB once again is choosing not to communicate with their customers about this issue–sure, it’s on Amazon’s end, but Aman Pro, Fillz, and Sellerengine have all posted things to their customer base, as well as answered questions on the AZ boards.

And the most ridiculous thing ever is that one poster on Amazon said that they asked AOB to keep to post something about the issue and keep the users up to date, and their answer was to read the Amazon Boards.

Ok, well, most days I am way too busy to read those boards–I only went there today in search of an answer– I noticed that my Amazon orders were taking 3 – 7 hours to be pulled. So I had to waste 20 mins reading threads on Amazon–when AOB could’ve just made a post at the top of their pages like they used to do, and saved me that 20 mins. No wonder people bash AOB so much. It’s like AOB wants us to quit their service. Or perhaps they think that the majority of their users are such small sellers that they would never leave? Can’t afford another service? Well, I’m a large enough seller to use Fillz, and even though I don’t like their set up, I found myself once again looking a fillz today–more precious time that I don’t really have. Why can’t AOB just communicate better?

And I wish that they would cut with the Blessings crap. Saying “Blessings,” doesn’t give a big OK for crappy customer service. I once thought about leaving AOB on their use of “Blessings” alone. I don’t like religion interjected with business, I find that too many people ty to use piety to cover up things. Maybe they think that we are all just dirty sinners, and therefore do not deserve to be communicated with about venue problems.

HALF-make sure your getting paid for every order.

Well this is kind of a big one too, but it doesn’t result in dbl sales, and it can be fixed. All sales are not being posted to payment history. Thank goodness I had a big enough sale to notice that my payment amount was off by glancing at it. I investigated further and found that a couple of my sales were not in my payment history despite being on the sales page. I did some research and it was a known issue though HALF did not post anything about it. I e-mailed HALF with the transaction info, and they posted them to my payment history. Also, from the info I read this happened sometime last year as well, and was fixed without a word as well. I have not had to the time to go through all my transactions to see if I am missing any other payments.

ALIBRIS

Is still processing upload files out of order. Thanx. I got 3 dbl orders, books with rankings over 500K. My rating is going to take a huge ding without the BN or Half sales to keep 5 stars.

To Fillz or not to Fillz

With AOBs recent unexplained downtime–in which there has been no communication whatsover about–I’ve decided to look at Fillz again.

I mean, if AOB would just communicate when this stuff happens, I wouldn’t even look at Fillz. A friend of mine sent them an e-mail asking what the downtime was all about, and all he got back was,

“The site has been repaired, Blessings”

No mention of whether the site was still pulling orders for the 12 or so hours that they were up and down, nada. No mention if this a a problem that will happen again, nada. No mention of the source of the problem. I don’t expect a site to be up 24/7, I know that there will be issues, I know that maintenance needs to be done, but I do expect to be communicated with. In the past if the site went down, they would post something about it, and also something about if orders were still being pulled, sometimes even a backdoor.

Images of Roger just being pissed off at AOB customers and unplugging the system have popped into our heads because there has been no explanation for the downtime.

And yes, we were just kidding around, but because of the non communication there are AOB customers that swear the more they complain about service the more their shit gets fucked up. Now, if AOB would communicate, no one in the world would believe these silly allegations, but since they don’t, there are people who do.

On to Fillz.

They are awesome about posting service outages, and maintenance times. But, the thing that gets me about Fillz, is that it seems like I have to take 2 – 4 steps to do things that I can do on AOB in one click. These are things that I do everyday so this is a biggie.

Also, I like the repricing better on AOB, I can run my repricer, and then pull up a page to reprice the books that weren’t auto repriced. This page shows 25 items with pricing in all Amazon cats. I can also set my repricer to not auto reprice, and do it all via the reprice inventory page. Maybe Fillz has this, but I can’t see it in the TEST site. AOB also allows me to really customize my repricer specs via check items and fill in the blanks, I dont even have to write my own script, or get one written for me.

I like the AOB venue sales break down, I saw a graph on Fillz, but it did not break down by venue, then again, this was the TEST site.

Also, AOB has an Expense Area, I can add all my expenses, and get a 1 page screenshot of a month with venue sales. item costs. and expenses.

So, for the time being I will be sticking with AOB, but if the site goes down again with no communication during, or even after the fact as to the specifics, I will have to suck it up and try Fillz

Alibris and Dbl Orders, Half, BN, AOB, Fillz, etc

An Albris repsonse that those of you who reprice might want to read. I will post their it below my summary.

I’ve had 2 dbl orders in the past week through Alibris, both were for items that sold and were deleted 5 – 7 days earlier. One item sold through Half ( which I finally opted out of) and the other through BN-which I will also be opting out of. I’ve been selling on Alibris for 5 years and know that it can be wonky, so instead of blaming AOB right off the bat, When this happens I always contact Alibris so that my rating doesn’t take a hit. In every case over the past few years, they were able to find the deletion file-so not AOBs problem.
In these 2 cases, I can see that this happened with books that had been repriced, and the processing on the repricing upload was delayed, while the deletion went through before it. .

For anyone who uses AOB or Fillz, this looks like some of these double sales can’t be helped if you reprice on a regular basis, until Alibris is at full speed again. Alibris, Half, and BN are slow as heck anyway. For the time being, I’m not sure how to solve it. . .Send deletes twice? I suspect that my probs will be mostly eliminated by opting out of those porgrams–if only Half.com would fix the whole book in a shopping cart can’t be deleted when sold on another venue issue.

Hello from Alibris,

Recently we have been experiencing longer-than-normal processing delays with respect to uploaded files as well as changes made to inventory using the tools on the Seller Hub. As a result it is sometimes possible that an order will occur and automatically delete any item while a waiting upload file still containing that item as available won’t process until after that deletion has happened. This would restore that item For Sale after it has already been sold and deleted once.

In this case, an upload file from you deleted the item on 4/5/08 just 4 minutes after midnight on April 5th, but another file containing that same item as “Available” (though it was probably an earlier file) was processed at 2:54am the same day, returning that item as available and leading to the order.

Thank God for Online Inventory management–Dreaded Blue Screen

BWB got an early phone call today, it was a wrong number. . .Being the silly girl that I am I took it as a sign that something was wrong and got out of bed to check my e-mail and sales. The Desktop didn’t really want to wake up, it was taking a minute just to open different e-mails. Then I noticed that my anti virus had froze while updating so I did a restart. . .

And I got the dreaded Blue Screen, a dll was missing. No time to mess with it, had 20 sales to pack.

All I can say is that it’s times like these that I’m glad I use AOB* to manage my inventory.

Besides pulling and deleting orders from all the sites I sell on, I also do all my shipping through AOB, and since it is online all I had to do was plug in my Printer and my Thermal printer to my laptop, download Endicia and go–same confirmation e-mail form letters, packing slips, I could still list my new inventory since I list directly on AOB, I could check and reprice my inventory, enter my expenses, everything, bingo.

I do back up my inventory every now and then, but I’m not going to kid you, I suck at backing things up. I run 2000pro, never turn my computer off, and have not lost anything from my desktop yet.**Who knows, maybe this time it will prove to be serious. Maybe this is the kick in the butt I need to upgrade to XP or Vista. I’m not sure Vista workss o well with my favorite online game DDO. I have been reluctant to upgrade from 2000pro because last time I checked it was still being sold and at a hefty price considering how old it is–it’s a good stable operating system. I also dread having to install all my software again and wondering if my licenses for Photoshop and Dreamweaver are, ah, still good.

I might just repair, and then install XP on another partition, but I would like to upgrade my motherboard too, so who knows? No scouting to day though, the weather sucks anyway.

*The Art of Books

**I have Had 2 laptops that ended up with corrupted hardrives. Do not ever slam down you laptop when having a fight with your Boyfriend.