Amazon officially welcomed sellers to its new Seller Forums on Monday and touted new features. One aspect Amazon didn’t highlight in the announcement was the fact the new boards display posters’ Amazon business names (many sellers use a handle rather than disclose their selling IDs on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay).
However, the announcement pointed to a page featuring FAQs where it touted the lack of anonymity on the forums as a positive:
Why is my Amazon business name showing on my Seller Forums profile?
Amazon business names are now part of a selling partner’s profile and cannot be removed to increase transparency within the community. It’s a great way to showcase your business and learn more about others you connect with. You can edit your business name within Seller Central.
When Amazon announced the new forums in October, many sellers expressed concern over Amazon’s decision to display their real business names next to their posts rather than a handle of their choosing.
Sellers said they feared that people who disagreed with their posts would be able to retaliate against them online and in real life, as we wrote in on the AuctionBytes Blog. That includes rivals, not just customers.
Not everyone was sympathetic to such concerns (“Life isn’t safe. Don’t run a business from your home if you don’t want your home address out there,” one reader commented in part.)
In a post on January 23rd, Amazon had announced the beginning of the migration to the new forums, writing in part: “In October, we launched the new Amazon Seller Forums experience, your daily stop for finding the answers that can help you find success selling in Amazon’s store. After listening to feedback from Forums users like you, we decided to delay completing the full onboarding into the new year. We’re excited to announce that starting today, we’ll be migrating existing Forums sellers into the new experience.”
In the FAQs Amazon pointed to, it explained that sellers could add their business logo and describe their business in “About me” and “About my business” sections.
Let us know what you think of Amazon’s new seller discussion boards.
Note: On Monday, posts displayed posters’ names or handles (for example, the Amazon moderator who posted the announcement was “Wyatt_Amazon”) but on Tuesday, posters’ names displayed as a string of characters (for example, Wyatt_Amazon displayed as “Seller_ueeRKvIifHAvc”).
