>However, the Amazon system is so broken that it potentially offers a fix for itself. When the Certification Team rejects your app, you don’t need to change the app. You do not need to respond to their requests. You do not need to make any of the changes that they demand. Since a new person reviews each submission, and since there is no limit on submissions, one way to get through the certification process is to simply roll the dice and spam the certification team. Submit an app 10 times, or 20 times, or 30 times. At some point you will probably get lucky, and someone will approve your app.
Amazon has clearly put a lot of thought into how this is going to work.
They also have no idea how to run a video streaming service; or they think they do, and just don't know how much it sucks. They also have started sucking in buying things, with things like "pantry" which require you to buy a box for $5 so you can get things like soap.
I canceled my prime and have been buying things from stores. I buy my videos (ala DVD) so I can watch them when i want and not be worried about them getting pulled by disney from the "prime" section and being forced to buy it.
Honestly, the only thing I have any respect for is AWS. But even that is severely lacking in polish in clarity, and it's almost a full time job trying to keep up with their additions and changes.
Delivering batches of household goods of arbitrary size profitably is a hard problem that no one has figured out. Everyone is fiddling with business models trying to make it work.
I think at the end of the day shipping is expensive and trying to hide that from customers without incentivizing profit-negative transactions is nigh impossible.
Things will probably change when we have droids roaming the sidewalks, but until then these strange charges are going to keep popping up.
Wait, wait, I think I've figured it out. Raise the price. Repeat until either the transaction is sufficiently profitable, or the customers go away.
That will work better for everyone than what Amazon has started to do lately, which is prevent you from buying certain items at any price until your order exceeds $25.
Basically, Amazon has started to tell their customers "No." That's new, and I agree with the other posters who call it a bearish sign.