One of the most useful services for new and experienced Amazon FBA and FBM sellers is the Amazon Seller Forums. It’s a great place to learn about policy, get advice on specific problems, and see what other sellers are experiencing in the marketplace. I frequently cite the forum posts in my Amazon FBA videos and “scam alerts.”
Not for much longer. Amazon announced that it is retooling the Seller Forums, adding a bunch of community features that few wanted, and even worse, forcing participants to use their real business names:
As the selling community grows, we believe that showing business names will help increase trust and mutual respect amongst sellers. It’s also another great way to network and learn more about the other sellers you engage with in the forums.
The reaction has been incredulous, as the image below shows:
Many frequent posters give good advice for free, or share their experiences. Now these posts can be associated with a specific seller account and physical address, inviting retribution, competitive attacks, negative review mobs, and worse. One seller summed up the situation and the likely impact as follows:
My opinion – 90% of Forum top 100 contributors will opt-out or never again be seen.
I say this, as It is hard to imagine a BUSINESS person giving out examples, and advice on a PUBLIC forum, when their business name is exposed to a few million others.
OK, yes a RESPONSIBLE business person will post very generic info, but no longer REAL WORLD info with any specificity.
Does Amazon NOT KNOW that this is a dog eat dog world?
If someone in your industry or business type discovers who you are, they can track your responses, then it is possible for them to infer quite a lot about your successes or failures if you do not SANITIZE your responses of all data, etc.
If in ANY COMMENT you post, you say ANYTHING major in regards to product, sales, etc, you now risk the dark size of the Amazon Vendor community taking advantage.
Bottomline, is Amazon will do as Amazon wants. As such.
I believe that Amazon MUST give all posters the option to wipe out their history because the forum has always been anonymous, and when each of us agreed to the amazon forum policy ( in which it states that “Amazon owns the content” ), we did so, ( OR AT LEAST I DID SO), knowing my comments were to be ANONYMOUSLY posted.
Making one PUBLICLY KNOWN is a breach.
Amazon forum support staff insists (behind their own anonymous handles) that it’s better for everyone, but the only people who seem to be accepting this line of reasoning are those who already use their real business names.
I have about 50 posts on the forums dating to 2019, so I may be going back and deleting all of my posts, but that’s not an option for old-timers who have thousands of posts over many years.