[Discalimer: I've never looked into this before and I have absolutely no idea how the Amazon reseller market works, so this might be impossible or prohibited.]
What's stopping somebody from relisting every product that already exists in the reseller market, but raising the price a few bucks? Even if people are more likely to buy the lesser priced product, the seller has to lose since they don't actually have any products on hand or skin in the game. Better yet, they could relist the products for less than the competitors and jack up the shipping prices to skim a few bucks profit off the top of each sale (this would work if somebody sorted by item price only, instead of price + shipping).
The risk is that you're on the hook for the book. You can certainly drop ship, and it's a common practice, but you have no quality control. For example, if you're drop shipping a book in "Good" condition and it gets to the buyer in "Fair" condition and they complain, you're out the money and it's your feedback on the line.
From experience, overpricing works when you have better feedback than your competitors.
My first question: what's the penalty for listing something that you can't deliver? As in, if someone buys 'your' copy, adn someone else buys the only other copy before you get it, what do you do and how does Amazon react when you do that?
Furthermore, though, how much more do you have to charge to cover your own time, shipping complexities, and just the general mess of dealing with two other entities for every sale you make? All of that adds up to a pain in the arse to make a couple bucks, in my estimation.
I've been a seller on amazon for the last 6 months. Your order to cancel ratio needs to be below 7%. If it's above this, your account will be restricted (you won't get paid during this time). It happened to me...but it was lifted after about a month.
Depending on the category, many things on Amazon sell so fast, it would be very difficult to do this.
>Furthermore, though, how much more do you have to charge to cover your own time, shipping complexities, and just the general mess of dealing with two other entities for every sale you make? All of that adds up to a pain in the arse to make a couple bucks, in my estimation.
If you can operate at large enough scale, thousands or tens of thousands of books a month, then I think there's an opportunity to be had, even if you're pocketing a dollar or two from each sale.
What's stopping somebody from relisting every product that already exists in the reseller market, but raising the price a few bucks? Even if people are more likely to buy the lesser priced product, the seller has to lose since they don't actually have any products on hand or skin in the game. Better yet, they could relist the products for less than the competitors and jack up the shipping prices to skim a few bucks profit off the top of each sale (this would work if somebody sorted by item price only, instead of price + shipping).