61–70 of 145 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember hearing about someone buying a multi-million dollar artwork with their platinum amex once, so it would seem so.
Platinum Amex I doubt. Maybe with a Centurion card.
[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…
My first question: what's the penalty for listing something that you can't deliver? As in, if someone buys 'your' copy, adn someone else buys the only other copy before you get it, what do you do and how does Amazon react when you do that? Furthermore, though, how much more do you have to charge to cover your own time, shipping complexities, and just the general mess of dealing with two other entities for every sale…
Depending on the category, many things on Amazon sell so fast, it would be very difficult to do this.
A quick visit to amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s... Multiple books priced upwards of $600m. One has a Kindle edition for 9.99.
[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…
My first question: what's the penalty for listing something that you can't deliver? As in, if someone buys 'your' copy, adn someone else buys the only other copy before you get it, what do you do and how does Amazon react when you do that? Furthermore, though, how much more do you have to charge to cover your own time, shipping complexities, and just the general mess of dealing with two other entities for every sale…
If you can operate at large enough scale, thousands or tens of thousands of books a month, then I think there's an opportunity to be had, even if you're pocketing a dollar or two from each sale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well there was the 'flash crash' but it wasn't that big a deal. This financially uninformed hacker thinks it could get much worse some day soon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash
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.
The problem is a vast number of transactions, and huge price moves, can happen in literally the blink of an eye.
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.
Not to mention that in order to make money over normal practices, you have to a) find books that are being sold at less than wholesale price (~60%ish RRP), and b) find a book that no-one wants to buy at your competitor's super-cheap rate that they will buy at your more expensive one - you're going to have to be in for the long haul to do this.
There's only one problem with this theory. The Amazon TOS requires sellers to have inventory before they can sell inventory. And they will ban you for life for violating that.
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…
I'm surprised the author (and no-one here) hasn't worked out the starting date of the automated price war based on the original RRP of the title :)
bordeebook was effectively increasing their price by a factor of 1.2684/day, and as of Apr 8 priced the new book at $2,198,177.95. I'll guess that the used price ($35.54) implies that the initial pricing of the new book was about $50. Log base 1.2684 of the ratio of the Apr 8 price to the estimated original price = log($2198177.95/$50)/log(1.2684) = 45 [days]. Ergo looks like the two algorithms started competing arou…
Neither number has integer cents, since the actual series rounded or truncated values between iterations. For that reason, a simple logarithm won't tell us what the original price was - you'd need a simulation of the rounding.