Amazon has long been open to competing third-party sellers (TPS), who sell through Amazon but ship independently or pay for Amazon’s fulfillment services. Collectively, the third-party selling space is known as the Amazon Marketplace, and its percentage of site sales has steadily increased in the last decade to 60 percent.
For many years, TPS have been using the Amazon platform to peddle both new and used copies of books, advance review copies, signed copies, and even illegal counterfeits. As any published author knows, once a book is available for sale at Amazon, it often takes less than a week for the first third-party listing to appear. Until spring 2017, the default seller for new books—the so-called winner of the buy box—was always Amazon; the buy box could never be held by a TPS. All that changed in spring 2017, when Amazon decided to bring its policy for books in line with its existing policies for other merchandise and allow TPS to become the default seller for new and used books alike.
At the time, the new policy kicked up a firestorm of complaint in the publishing community but also led to a healthy tightening of publishers’ own sales policies—particularly as they relate to advance review copies, hurts, and remainders—and tighter controls on what books are sold as new on the Amazon platform.
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