Amazon prohibits third party sales of Nintendo products

[attakid101 250]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/amazon-no-more-third-party-sales-of-nintendo-products-without-approval/

Looks like Amazon is putting the kibosh on the selling of used Nintendo stuff. Also that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word “kibosh” in a sentence.

[RH 4,002]

What a crock...

I don’t buy from Amazon but that just sounds like a bad move.  Of course, Amazon doesn’t have photos of goods so there’s also the distinct chance that the counterfeit market killed it.

[Tulpa 2,826]

Well, that's a big bag of weiners. I've gotten a couple of good deals off of Amazon before.

[barrels 124]

Just now, Tulpa said:

Well, that's a big bag of weiners. I've gotten a couple of good deals off of Amazon before.

Same here. Often it’s risky if you’re sticklers for condition but I’ve gotten pretty lucky

[Californication 1,466]

I just got three good deals on Amazon and one shitty one I had to return.

One of the winners was a high end game 40% under valued in beautiful shape. I am going to resell it to pay for two of the other games.

The thing is Japanese games sometimes come over cheaper there and in general, when prices in the market change rapidly, Amazon sellers don't always adjust as fast as say an ebay seller. 

[drxandy 2,965]

Wow that's crazy, blame all the repros?

[broncofantd793 138]

Wow, this is surprising.

I’ve gotten sealed games at cib prices 3 or 4 times off Amazon. This must be outweighed by the repro carts. 

[elprincipe 125]

What a gift they just gave eBay! I wonder like the rest of you if this is because of the large portion of sales that are bootlegs and maybe the resulting returns/customer service headaches? I hope it's not because they are colluding with Nintendo...

[austin532 457]

I'm sure Nintendo has gotten alot of customer service calls as well about why poor Timmy's Pokemon game doesn't work properly.

[arch_8ngel 1,597]

Surprised they would do this for all items and not just "new" items.

[ExplodedHamster 394]

Third party stuff is unaffected, so Nintendo must have been involved somehow...and I’m not quite sure why, at least as it pertains to older stuff. The number of Mario 3s available went from 175 or so to 25ish. So the approved sellers list as of now is pretty short.

[spacepup 2,041]

Nintendo can be pretty intense sometimes.  I'm actually glad we are no longer "NintendoAge" particularly since we are buying and selling things here.   Realistically, I doubt Nintendo really cares much about us comparatively to say, Amazon.com, but still - can't hurt to get away from literally having their company name in the title of our website.

[nrslam 343]

Maybe ebay will be next.  Search for 'reproduction pokemon' and you'll get over 23,000 hits.  And that's just from sellers admitting they're selling repros.

 

[spacepup 2,041]

I think the situation with ebay is a bit different.

I don't know the details - but I'd imagine this has been a major problem and headache for both Amazon AND Nintendo, and they likely communicated and then Amazon made a final decision here.  

I am a bit surprised by this Amazon announcement, but I'd be *shocked* if something like this happened with ebay.  Anything seems to go on ebay and they get their fee regardless and don't seem to really care that much about repros hah.

[darkchylde28 1,494]

Kind of a sad day.  I'm mostly done with collecting anything from Nintendo, but I did get really good deals on the copies of DK Jr Math, Dragon Fighter, Robo Demons & Sword Master I picked up a few years back.  Plus, I got to spend Amazon bucks that I had which would otherwise have likely sat and done nothing.

[Teh_Lurv 238]

I think the intention of this move is to clamp down on modern counterfeits (I recall counterfeit Wiimotes and WiiU pro controllers got pretty bad at one point) and Amazon decided it'd be easier to ban all 3rd party selling rather than to play referee.

[Tanooki 4,524]

I imagine it was Nintendo and Amazon collaborating on that, and perhaps others (Sony,etc) and third parties may take notice after seeing how it changes things over a short time.  Yes it's a control issue, but I think the large scale amount of bootlegs and also hacks/repops too were the problem.  Imagine the lost money (as time is money) call reps and email reps from both companies had to deal with getting comments about a used item to a game that seemingly didn't work right or at all because it was a bootleg or something else that wasn't 100% factory made.  I'm sure they all tired of it and this move would limit the sales of those products to what is approved taking that big headache off both of them.  I'd be more surprised if this somehow trickled into ebay than anything else because there, mercari, even aliexpress the people there surely have the idea better than the amazon pool is what they're buying and from what source.

[Nintegageo 511]

Honestly, I HATE bootlegs, so good. Wish eBay would do it as well. Granted it would just mean sellers would start lying about their cartridges - but perma-banning the sellers could help. 

[phart010 1,571]

My guess is that this has to do with the fact that a large portion of used Nintendo sales are for collectors. And collectors can be quite picky about condition.

The Amazon platform only has stock images, it does not allow sellers to post photos of their specific item. I can imagine tons of collectors having initiated returns because they were not satisfied with the condition of the game they bought. Amazon probably just figured that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

[Ninja Warriors 86]

I guess it was about the condition of the games since most did not have pictures.  It’s a shame because I had good luck with Amazon a few years ago on a CIB Swordmaster for the nes (dead mint but had no pictures), and a CIB Biker Mice From Mars for the SNES (good to very good range and again no pictures).