Barnes & Noble has stopped paying some of its marketplace sellers, who said they have been unable to get information from the company about when payments will resume. The problem appears to be related to a 2-week outage of the marketplace section after Barnes & Noble relaunched its website in late June – sellers say the marketplace is still experiencing some technical issues.
We reached out to the company on Wednesday and received the following statement from spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating on Thursday:
“A small number of BN.com marketplace sellers have been affected by an issue that delayed the processing of some payments. We take this very seriously and our team is working on processing all delayed payments today. They will post to the seller’s accounts starting tomorrow. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank our valued marketplace sellers for their patience as we work to expand the capabilities of BN.com.”
The main Barnes & Noble website was operational after the late-June relaunch, which was designed to feature better search capabilities and offer an improved user experience. But when the site relaunched, third-party sellers were shut out from the marketplace.
We reported on the outage in early July, when a Barnes & Noble spokesperson acknowledged the problem. “We recently launched our bn.com website without Marketplace going live. Our plan is to have Marketplace back up and live tomorrow,” she said – but according to sellers writing to EcommerceBytes, the marketplace was down for the first half of July.
“It has been partially back up since then but is not functioning at 100%,” wrote one reader. “We have been receiving and shipping out orders from Barnes & Noble since July 19th, but have still not been paid for any of them.”
The seller said B&N schedules payments every Tuesday for deposit into sellers’ bank accounts on Wednesdays. “We have now missed 3 weekly payments.”
Another seller told us Barnes & Noble’s Marketplace for sellers “was STILL not working after a month of their “fixing” it,” and said things had gotten much worse. “I still cannot update OR refund OR even look at my inventory with B&N. I’ve received orders that I had listed were SOLD years ago, but the only answer I get from B&N is, they’re working on the site AND WILL LET ME KNOW WHEN IT IS available!”
Another seller said they hadn’t received payments for sales since June 23rd. “I am a small company. A couple grand may not be a big deal to B&N, but it is to me.”
One seller told EcommmerceBytes he hasn’t been able to access the site at all since June 29th, “and all my emails I send to Barnes and Nobles are computer-generated responses.”
