Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#91

Post by mrighele » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

sspiff wrote: post #8

Perhaps include in the title that this is from 2011. I haven't seen these kind of things recently, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Sometimes I have fun searching for generic stuff (like 'book') in Amazon and then ordering by descending price. Right know for example you can get "Educational Research: Competencies for Analysis and Applications (with MyEducationLab) Value Package (includes SPSS 16.0 Student Version for Windows)" [1] for a mere $11,259,120.28. Please notice that it is the value package :-).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Educational-Research-Competencies-Appl...

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#92

Post by zeeshanm » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 4:23 AM UTC

55555 wrote: post #89

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you explain more about how the arbitrage works ? I am confused how it is possible. for instance, I buy a lot of used books from amazon.com (well, third party sellers). when i one-buy click, the purchase goes through immediately, and the sellar already has the book listed, so i am confused how it would even be done.

This is very easy and actually quite common between Amazon and Ebay. You would list the title as Merchant Fulfilled on Amazon and when someone orders it you would place the order yourself on Half.com using their shipping address and pocketing the difference.

To add to this, you can use Amazon Listing API to add/remove items that are available on Half.com.

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#93

Post by mcv » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:49 AM UTC

bluedevil2k wrote: post #27

yc1010 wrote: post #22

Everyone is missing the point, this is an example of money laundering 1. Get dirty cash from drug sales, prostitution, etc and buy amazon.com giftcards in shops in US 2. Input the codes into various amazon buyer account(s) 3. Buy the book(s) from these account(s) 4. Amazon takes a cut and pays clean money into authors bank account.

The best? Amazon takes a 30% cut and then the government (here in the US) takes another 28% for income tax, 12.4% for SSN, and 2.9% for Medicare. You get less than half your cash into clean money. Plus, there's a huge paper trail of buyers and the million dollar book would likely set off flags on every sale.

To go from money you can't use to money you can use, that's not a bad deal, actually. But selling a million dollar book is probably too conspicuous. It's better to do this with something that's actually worth that much.

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#94

Post by misiti3780 » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

zeeshanm wrote: post #92

55555 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very easy and actually quite common between Amazon and Ebay. You would list the title as Merchant Fulfilled on Amazon and when someone orders it you would place the order yourself on Half.com using their shipping address and pocketing the difference.

To add to this, you can use Amazon Listing API to add/remove items that are available on Half.com.

how did you go about finding the items that were on Half but not on amazon though ? - manually ?

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#95

Post by Apofis » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 12:04 AM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #62

At my last job, I wrote a bit about this: https://sellerengine.com/top-5-myths-about-amazon-repricing-... It's a funny situation to be sure, but remember that somebody was trying to sell that book, and their software screwed up in a way that just shouldn't happen, preventing them from making that sale.

It's very simple, if you use an Amazon Repricer that's retarded and you don't set a max price, this happens.

Re: Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)

#96

Post by zeeshanm » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #94

zeeshanm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, you can use Amazon Listing API to add/remove items that are available on Half.com.

how did you go about finding the items that were on Half but not on amazon though ? - manually ?

Doing it manually is one way but not scalable. You can aggregate data either using available APIs or by scraping websites. You can list books on Amazon that are available on Half.com and give you a decent profit margin. It doesn't matter if books are already listed on Amazon. Just make sure your offer price is a little bit cheaper than the cheapest available copy.