Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#51

Post by meric » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:26 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #19

baddox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone always mentions that buying more items from a single Amazon store would make shipping cheaper? Is that ever true? Of all the online stores I've made purchases from, I believe monoprice is the only one that appears to base shipping on tiers based on item size/mass. All the rest simply charge a set rate for each item, and it doesn't matter how you divide your shipments up into different orders.

well, the post office would take less of a cut. shipping one one-pound box is usually a lot cheaper than shipping two half-pound boxes. In theory, amazon could either give that surplus to the seller, to the buyer, or they could split it between the two. (I guess they could also keep it for themselves, but that might have negative PR consequences.)

They'd also price it "above equilibrium" leading to a loss of potential profits.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#52

Post by jarek » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:30 AM UTC

abraham wrote: post #44

jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't, because although computers have a lot of control over the market, people also look at it pretty regularly. The reason why nobody noticed a $23,000,000 book on Amazon is because out-of-print biology books are not very liquid. If that were Microsoft stock, someone would have manually made a bet on it, and then the price would have corrected after a while.

There are also obscure stocks that not many people look at.

Obscure stocks can't have much impact on the stock market as a whole by definition.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#53

Post by abraham » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:31 AM UTC

jarek wrote: post #52

abraham wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also obscure stocks that not many people look at.

Obscure stocks can't have much impact on the stock market as a whole by definition.

What is your point? The books in question were also obscure.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#54

Post by jrockway » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:33 AM UTC

abraham wrote: post #53

jarek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obscure stocks can't have much impact on the stock market as a whole by definition.

What is your point? The books in question were also obscure.

And they didn't have much impact on the book market.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#55

Post by zecho » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:33 AM UTC

pitdesi wrote: post #10

Someone should try selling a book that there are limited copies of (ie one that can't be procured easily) to see what happens if someone buys from a seller who doesn't have it.

My wife used to sell used books on Amazon part-time a few years ago, mostly as a hobby to feed her own library. She employed some software and pricing algorithms, similar to the ones mentioned in the post.

Often, she'd go to library or estate sales and just scan hundreds of books. If they met her pricing targets, she'd buy them. But one time a book she scanned had an incorrect barcode number (it wasn't clear if Amazon had the incorrect barcode or what), but so did several other sellers of the same book.

When she posted the book for sale, it came up with a different title, but she hadn't noticed while she was posting inventory. Initially my wife assumed she'd lost the inventory when someone tried to buy from her, but it wasn't until she tried to drop ship from another seller that they realized what was going on.

The sellers all had to cancel their orders with each other on down to the buyer, who took it in stride.

But, with Amazon, you can still rate sellers who cancel your order, so there's at least that risk...

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#56

Post by jarek » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:35 AM UTC

abraham wrote: post #53

jarek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obscure stocks can't have much impact on the stock market as a whole by definition.

What is your point? The books in question were also obscure.

Yes, and their impact on Amazon as a whole was nil. JonnieCache was claiming it could get worse than the flash crash.

For the record, I personally think it could, but not due to bugs in pricing obscure stocks.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#57

Post by zecho » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:38 AM UTC

naner wrote: post #47

siegler wrote: post #21

A similar thing happened to me as a seller. I saw that one of my old textbooks was selling for a nice price, so I listed it along with two other used copies. I priced it $1 cheaper than the lowest price offered, but within an hour both sellers had changed their prices to $.01 and $.02 cheaper than mine. I reduced it two times more by $1, and each time they beat my price by a cent or two. So what I did was reduce my p…

You could turn this into a book business. List books for sale that you don't own and this other publisher does own. Reduce the price over time until it is super cheap. Buy while it is low and resell it without the competition.

My wife has experimented with that, sort of. She wouldn't not try to force the market down, but she'd occasionally find arbitrage situations on Amazon and exploit them. Buy a book placed at far too low of a price and then simply re-list it at a correct price.

The thing is that while these automatic pricing scripts exist, they aren't in enough widespread use to do what you're suggesting.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#58

Post by kingcub » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:41 AM UTC

mdda wrote: post #43

ChuckMcM wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you play World of Warcraft this is a solid Auction House technique. I find it humorous to see it applied to the 'real' world (not that WoW economics aren't just as 'real'). The ability to push the price down gives informed actors some pricing control on the market, and the subtext is that it allows for folks to push around pricing to understand the elasticity for any product. Now if you can get them to buy a 'put'…

And (from what I understand) this is just the kind of thing that High Frequency Trading algorithms are doing.

Some but it's a pretty small minority if HFT algos.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#59

Post by zecho » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:42 AM UTC

guynamedloren wrote: post #48

[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 prod…

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.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#60

Post by naner » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 3:49 AM UTC

RyanKearney wrote: post #49

naner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could turn this into a book business. List books for sale that you don't own and this other publisher does own. Reduce the price over time until it is super cheap. Buy while it is low and resell it without the competition.

Risky. What if someone buys it? I mean, you could at least have a few books ready to ship out just in case.

I was mostly joking but if you were really going to do this you'd have to develop strategies to reduce the chances of this happening and mitigate it when it does.

Maybe if you have a slightly bad reputation on Amazon that will keep people from buying your book. Maybe you can purchase the book locally and send it to the buyer in a pinch. Maybe you can purchase the book from the actual seller and just use the buyer's shipping address. Etc.