Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#81

Post by bronson »

zeeshanm wrote: post #74

I read on NPR a while ago some guys found an arbitrage opportunity in book prices. So - he would track the most sought after books, buy them when price were low, usually around July/August, and then sell them back on Amazon when prices were high, around the time of September and January. Makes sense.

Planet Money, probably their second best textbook story:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/10/363103753/textbook...

(best imo was talking about the whole mess around writing textbooks)

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#84

Post by rhizome »

branchless wrote: post #27
GabrielF00 wrote: post #12

They mention HDMI cables specifically. I just went into a Best Buy and asked for their cheapest HDMI cable. The salesman showed me one for $15. The Amazon basics cable is $5.49. If you've got Prime and you factor in the shipping costs of using another website, it's hard to beat Amazon's price.

HDMI cables are IMHO the worst example. These are add-on to core purchases and when they break or are required you just want to get one. Physical stores like BestBuy know this and price accordingly. This just makes me dislike these stores even more!

It's pretty ridiculous that device manufacturers don't include them.

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#85

Post by ObviousScience »

notatoad wrote: post #73
dominotw wrote: post #15

I buy from amazon for their predictable shipping and insanely awesome customer service.

I buy from amazon for their low prices - sure, they aren't always the lowest, but they're the lowest often enough that I can safely shop at amazon without shopping around. I don't want to price check five different stores before I buy something, the convenience of knowing that amazon almost always is selling something for reasonably close to the lowest price is valuable to me.

I'm curious how often the lowest price is > 90% of Amazon's price. (And for that matter, > 80%, 65%, and 50%.)

There's a certain premium I'm willing to pay to have it all handled by one reliable company, as long as they're not charging too much.

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#86

Post by eurusd »

I also like the simple but effective Keepa http://keepa.com to compare amazon prices in different countries at the same time. In Europe for example, Hometheater amps are 50% cheaper in Germany than france, while france is cheaper on something else and UK is cheaper on tools and sometimes projectors (depending of FX rates)

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#87

Post by philsnow »

ObviousScience wrote: post #85
notatoad wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy from amazon for their low prices - sure, they aren't always the lowest, but they're the lowest often enough that I can safely shop at amazon without shopping around. I don't want to price check five different stores before I buy something, the convenience of knowing that amazon almost always is selling something for reasonably close to the lowest price is valuable to me.

I'm curious how often the lowest price is > 90% of Amazon's price. (And for that matter, > 80%, 65%, and 50%.) There's a certain premium I'm willing to pay to have it all handled by one reliable company, as long as they're not charging too much.

A part of me would pay a certain premium to keep records of all the things I've purchased online in as many different places as possible, rather than providing one company with a fairly good profile of what my interests are.

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#88

Post by rprospero »

corysama wrote: post #39
indymike wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can speak to 25 years ago: the answer is yes. Here are some of the things I saw: * Marking items up 30-45 days ahead of a big sale. This allowed our price to be 25% off instead of 10%. Or sometimes, our sale price probably should have been the regular price. This happened all the time, and people fell for it hard. Usually this would happen before a 10% off everything sale. * Price adjustments from competitive shops…

In the furniture biz, lots of places have laws restricting how many days/year a given shop can do "going out of business"/"total clearance" sales. Otherwise, they tend to run them non-stop for decades because they are so effective at bringing in customers. According to my friends that have worked furniture retail, it was common practice to mark everything up 300% for a week then have a "40-60% Off!!!" sale. Customers…

I do remember being confused when a local furniture store advertised their "third annual going out of business sale"

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#89

Post by exhilaration »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #6

http://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!)

If anyone is curious about whether's it's worth checking CamelCamelCamel before making an Amazon purchase, look at the price history for this tea in the past year:

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Stash-Tea-Green-Chai-Count/produc...

The price rapidly fluctuates between $18.99 and $14.24 on a nearly monthly basis. In this case it's worth it to create an alert and wait a week or two for the price to drop again.

Re: How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

#90

Post by brixon »

listic wrote: post #69
DiabloD3 wrote: post #11

I dont get why they use HDMI cables as their first example: we keep buying HDMI cables because they get busted, not because we need more. AmazonBasics is currently the best cheap cable (replacing Monoprice's now that they aren't nearly as good as they used to be). Also, why does the article call them HD cables. Whats an HD cable? None of my ports say HD, they say HDMI. And it doesn't even get into how Prime games S&H…

How does Prime game S&H?

If you are a Prime user then logout of Amazon and go look for that same item again. If the item is sold/shipped by Amazon then you might not find a big difference, but if the item is sold/shipped by a different company then you will see that the price is lower, but you have to pay shipping.

Resellers in the Amazon site have to up their prices to account for the free shipping, but I find that the upped price is still a bit cheaper than paying for the shipping separate.

Post reply on HN