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Occam's razor. Automated pricing, not laundering, lol. Amazon provides an interface for it. Provide rules for automatically updating price. Very common in the online book market. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
Related: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809866 - Oct 2020 (81 comments) Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247254 - Jan 2018 (106 comments) Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742 - Sept 2015 (94 comments) Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
There's the original 2011 thread, Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854
Related: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809866 - Oct 2020 (81 comments) Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247254 - Jan 2018 (106 comments) Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742 - Sept 2015 (94 comments) Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
HN search for "book about flies" turns up 8 threads as the top results. In addition to the current thread, these three, and one posted in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494910 Naturally, those three threads have no discussion on them.
But what I meant by similar cases wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean other threads about this book about flies. I meant other mysterious cases of extreme outlier pricing—for other weird products. I'm pretty sure there have been a number of those over the years but my memory of what they were has eroded away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN search for "book about flies" turns up 8 threads as the top results. In addition to the current thread, these three, and one posted in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494910 Naturally, those three threads have no discussion on them.
Yes, by convention we don't bother linking to past threads with no comments. But what I meant by similar cases wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean other threads about this book about flies. I meant other mysterious cases of extreme outlier pricing—for other weird products. I'm pretty sure there have been a number of those over the years but my memory of what they were has eroded away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963743
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5448806
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3618114
Of course, this is a much noisier way to search, as it also picks up mentions of Lord of the Flies.
Occam's razor. Automated pricing, not laundering, lol. Amazon provides an interface for it. Provide rules for automatically updating price. Very common in the online book market. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
Hmm. Is there a way to short-sell physical items like books?
Get a copy by other means, then list it on Amazon for slightly less than the cheaper ("legit") seller and order it from the expensive ("scam") one, hopefully before they adjust their prices. Then the scam seller buys it from you to sell to...you, and you pocket the difference. This will presumably only work if the scam seller also automates the actual purchasing. If there is a human in the loop, they may look elsewhe…
It wasn't like I was planning on starting a business of reselling it, but it was startling.