Amazon experienced an outage on Thursday that left sellers unable to complete tasks for well over 3 hours. The only positive aspect of the outage was that it did not appear to impact shoppers’ ability to search or purchase goods.
Glitches on Amazon.com are generally less common than other marketplaces, but when Seller Central goes down, sellers are understandably anxious, particularly since it can cause them to miss shipping deadlines. Such outages can lead to delayed orders and poor experiences for buyers trying to communicate with sellers, which then hurt sellers’ standings – critical given Amazon’s exceptionally high demands on seller performance.
Sellers began reporting the problem on June 25th after 2 pm ET. The problem was documented on Ecommerce EKG with the first report coming in at 2:22 pm, and a report the site was back up at 5:25 pm ET.
When it came back, some sellers found they were logged in to Amazon Canada and had to toggle back to Amazon.com. And some said a strange message displayed about their credit card information.
Amazon Seller Central had experienced an outage for about 3 hours in early May, and again last November.
With the outage, sellers were unable to manage orders, print postage or conduct other selling activities.
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