Yes and no. It's true this a policy violation, but I can tell you unequivocally that a huge percentage of used sellers on Amazon are actually arbitraging their competitors inventory. As a midlevel sized buyer and seller on Amazon, I've always assumed that these sellers had some kind of secret upper-tier arrangement with Amazon? Because as buyers, we see high volume sellers do things on a daily basis that we would never do as sellers for mortal fear of our account getting banned. Yet somehow these megasellers seem able to muddle on year after year?

A lot of them are not necessarily even primarily e-commerce sellers, but are semi-camouflaged divisions of larger traditional publishing entities - like how the seller oneworldbooks is actually the textbook wholesaling giant MBS Books. These sellers are companies so large they are akin to major new-book publishers, so I assume their relationship with Amazon as a company is cozier than ours is as "random small bookstore with Amazon account".

There is an upper-tier "club" on Amazon, you can see it alluded to indirectly in various SC help files. Maybe these guys get away with more than we do.

Ha ha ha ... I've encountered lots of annoying sellers who do this -- I make an order and they cancel it last minute because they obviously don't have the book/CD. Yet I keep on seeing them appear.