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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…
Example: don't ask me why I enjoy the movie My Dinner With Andre, but for whatever reason, I do. A few years back, I wanted to buy a copy of the DVD and checked Amazon. It turned out that the DVD was long out of print, and new copies were going for $400 apiece. I figured this price was high, but nevertheless, it was nothing that couldn't be explained by actual rarity and supply/demand metrics. Rare DVDs have been known to climb into the hundreds of dollars, especially if new and unopened. But I came back a few days later, and the price was $1932.78 (or something unusual to that effect). The next day, $3500 and change. Which struck me as odd, to say the least. Was some nefarious Goldman trader attempting to fix the market for Wallace Shawn's back catalog?
Needless to say, I didn't love the movie quite that much. So I passed. These days, Criterion has released a new DVD version of the film, and accordingly, everything's dropped back down to about $30 per copy -- including the price of the original, OOP version. I feel sorry for anyone who actually might have taken the plunge at $400, which is not out of the realm of possibility. That's a lot of money for a film about two guys having dinner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Offering to sell stocks at a below-market price without an intention to complete the deal is market manipulation and illegal in most countries.
Er...why was this downvoted ? I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked in the financial sector and undergone FSA mandated training courses on what you can and can't legally do with equity pricing. What the OP was suggesting is an illegal practice in most equity markets.
I have a book with 1 sale and 6 sellers including amazon. They definitely do not have the book.
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.
Hmmm. I wonder if this would work in reverse? Suppose I want to buy a book that has several new copies for sale on the Amazon Marketplace for say $60. If I post a new copy for sale for $10, perhaps one of these algorithms would kick in to reduce the price?
In the meanwhile what would you do if you get placed an order for several of those?
Automatic pricing is super common these days, even on more expensive things than books. I'm actually working on a startup called shopobot.com that wants to help people use the volatility to their advantage. We see rapid $50-100 swings on things like SLRs, so it's actually pretty significant. Ironically our site is down right now because we're based on Amazon's web services. Karma? :)
Automatic pricing is super common these days, even on more expensive things than books. I'm actually working on a startup called shopobot.com that wants to help people use the volatility to their advantage. We see rapid $50-100 swings on things like SLRs, so it's actually pretty significant. Ironically our site is down right now because we're based on Amazon's web services. Karma? :)
> My preferred explanation for bordeebook’s pricing is that they do not actually possess the book. 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 lot of them are not necessarily even primarily e-commerce sellers, but are semi-camouflaged divisions of larger traditional publishing entities - like how the seller oneworldbooks is actually the textbook wholesaling giant MBS Books. These sellers are companies so large they are akin to major new-book publishers, so I assume their relationship with Amazon as a company is cozier than ours is as "random small bookstore with Amazon account".