I see this all the time. On Ebay too.
Hmmmmm, maybe I'm spending too much time trolling for things to buy?
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
41–50 of 145 posts
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#42A 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…
Why go to that effort? Did you really save any money, or more importantly time/effort? Paying for the shipping on the other books alone would seem to negate any higher profit margin that resulted in not having to compete with their prices.
Except now he has five copies to sell instead of three, and he can sell them for much more than he paid for the two from the automated sellers.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#43A 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…
If you play World of Warcraft this is a solid Auction House technique. I find it humorous to see it applied to the 'real' world (not that WoW economics aren't just as 'real'). The ability to push the price down gives informed actors some pricing control on the market, and the subtext is that it allows for folks to push around pricing to understand the elasticity for any product. Now if you can get them to buy a 'put'…
And (from what I understand) this is just the kind of thing that High Frequency Trading algorithms are doing.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#44Earlier 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.
There are also obscure stocks that not many people look at.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#46Earlier 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.
No. If someone were asking $23m for a share of MSFT it would just be way outside the market and would just sit there. Plenty of people leave way outside the market bids and asks just in case someone else makes an accidental huge market order.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#47A 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.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#48[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 products on hand or skin in the game. Better yet, they could relist the products for less than the competitors and jack up the shipping prices to skim a few bucks profit off the top of each sale (this would work if somebody sorted by item price only, instead of price + shipping).
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#49A 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.
Risky. What if someone buys it? I mean, you could at least have a few books ready to ship out just in case.
Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
#50[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 you make? All of that adds up to a pain in the arse to make a couple bucks, in my estimation.