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 price by a few dollars every hour for one day until everybody was priced under $5. Then I bought their books and changed my price back.
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
21–30 of 145 posts
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#22It's gonna be quite a giggle when this happens with the stock market.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#23I'm interested where the 1.270589 number comes from. sqrt(golden ratio) is close: 1.27201965
I would guess it's derived from other statistics using yet more automated systems.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#24It's gonna be quite a giggle when this happens with the stock market.
You think it doesn't?
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#25It's gonna be quite a giggle when this happens with the stock market.
You think it doesn't?
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.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#26A 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.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any 3rd party tools available to 3rd party sellers? Offering something that beats the current algorithms could be a good deal (if its not illegal).
I have code that does ecommerce price point optimization using machine learning. In an ideal setting, it combines a variety of signals, including prediction using previous sales data. It's also able to "smooth" over different products, so that you can make good price point choices even for products that have very little sales history.
What would be even more useful is to have the browsing customer's data passed in as a signal as well, but I'm guessing Amazon doesn't send that out to third parties. If 3rd parties could also customize their prices based on the potential of someone to buy (and perhaps offer bundled items based on their own algorithms) we'd probably see even greater efficiencies than we've already seen.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#28A 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 love that. It's a great lesson to programmers that we should think about the extreme cases and have set lower and upper bounds on our algorithms. Sanity checks should be in your code for most applications and inputs.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#29A 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 love that. It's a great lesson to programmers that we should think about the extreme cases and have set lower and upper bounds on our algorithms. Sanity checks should be in your code for most applications and inputs.
Amazon should put an upper bound on the maximum price a product can be. Can credit card companies even process a transaction in the tens of millions of dollars?
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#30This explains a lot. I wrote a small book back in the 90s that had few sales and was unlamented when it fell out of print. A couple of years ago saw it as the subject of an amazon.com sidebar ad and was astonished to find that it was listed at $100 or thereabouts, and couldn't imagine how or why it might have become collectible. The idea that this was the result of competing pricing algorithms makes a great deal more…
My dad had a similar experience. His very obscure, self-published, out-of-print book was showing up for something like $1000, while at the same time he was mailing out free copies to people who emailed (plus shipping), just to make more room in the garage.