How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
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Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#2This has been WalMart's strategy for decades so it shouldn't surprise anyone.
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#3Amazon jacks the price around on a lot of the household items that I buy. There one item that I last purchased for $11.94. I have seen it as high as $29 and some change. Right now it is $23.94.
I've wised up to this tactic and will buy extra when the price is low enough to make it a better deal than buying at the grocery store.
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#4Pricing the most-seen items lower is not quite as nefarious as "trick" would suggest, IMHO - and part of it is probably just driven by various advantages of selling a lot of some particular product.
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#5When I started working on https://trackif.com, I thought the premise was thin because prices couldn't fluctuate that much. I assumed everything gradually declined in price, and that it'd primarily be driven by store-A vs store-B price dropping.
Nope. Retailers are just gaming us 24/7. I've become very aware of all the different timeframes retailers offer post-purchase price-matches (published at http://blog.trackif.com/trackif-smart-shopping-guide-store-p... since I felt like I was hoarding knowledge.)
Have retailers always played games like this? Or it just a side-effect of sales moving online?
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#6http://camelcamelcamel.com/
(Amazon price tracking.) Very useful if/when you want to buy something and want to check historical prices. (You can also set email alerts when something drops to below a certain price.)
Edit: linkified. (Thanks, canvia!)
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#7As has been said, this should be no surprise at all - especially if you've followed phenomenons like the Harry Potter books that got the same treatment.
Amazon underbid competitors on the short tail and make it up on the long tail.
Amazon also stand the benefit that nothing is technically "upsale", since it's all horizontally in the same basket, so they can't get accused of selling you extra stuff the way other vendors might.
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#8http://camelcamelcamel.com/ (Amazon price tracking.) Very useful if/when you want to buy something and want to check historical prices. (You can also set email alerts when something drops to below a certain price.) Edit: linkified. (Thanks, canvia!)
I second this recommendation. Linkified: http://camelcamelcamel.com/
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#9[deleted]
Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
#10When I started working on https://trackif.com , I thought the premise was thin because prices couldn't fluctuate that much. I assumed everything gradually declined in price, and that it'd primarily be driven by store-A vs store-B price dropping. Nope. Retailers are just gaming us 24/7. I've become very aware of all the different timeframes retailers offer post-purchase price-matches (published at http://blog.trackif.…
https://trackif.com/domains/amazon.com/53a901bb72d6d0fc3d3d0...
Interested if you get more profit from demanding sign-in before you'll let people follow your Amazon links. Have you tried just using referrer links - presumably you do it this way on the basis that long term association gains enough to let one-time users abandon and skip direct to the site for purchase??
Interesting site, would definitely try it if there were a localised version for UK, anyone know of something similar for UK sites??
Presumably though Amazon do per-user pricing too?