16 ms·
Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices
- intopieces 10y agoI've learned over the years to completely ignore the 'list price' and simply check camelcamelcamel.com, a website that tracks the prices for most items on the site. If it's within 10% of the lowest price from the past year, I bite. Else: I shop around. I think consumers are getting savvier over all, and the list price is losing its effect.
- pervycreeper 10y ago>“I’m well aware that it is bogus but it is a common marketing tactic that works very well at boosting sales,” It seems to work on enough people, though.
- oneloop 10y agoInteresting. Amazon has rules on their affiliate program against storing price information. They have recently kicked out a big player in the space for this reason. Any info on why camelcamelcamel has been allowed to stay?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- intopieces 10y agoI'm not sure there's anything Amazon can really do. AFAIK, it's a script that just scrapes the information on a timer, like Internet Archive does. It's no different from checking it yourself and making a spreadsheet, right?
- oneloop 10y agoDepends. Amazon's terms and conditions for participation in their affiliate program explicitly states that doing that is breach. What they can do, and like I mentioned do do, is they close down your account and keep your money, and now you're out of business.
- ebbv 10y agoThis is interesting but I think based on a false assumption. Speaking only for myself I currently buy a lot from Amazon, but it's based entirely on whether a given product is a good deal or not. I have no particular loyalty to Amazon (even though I'm a long time Prime member.) Anything that isn't a good deal, I don't and won't buy from Amazon.
- yaacov 10y agoThat's what they want you to think ;)
- ams6110 10y agoHonestly, what is and isn't a good deal is up to the buyer. If I see something I need on Amazon, and the price seems like a good value, I buy it. I don't worry too much about shopping around because my time is worth something and I have a ballpark idea of what a "good value" is for anything I would buy online.
- ebbv 10y agoThat's a silly response. Amazon is an online retailer, they are the absolute most vulnerable to cross shopping. If I'm at a local grocery store or farmer's market and see something I like I'm much more likely to buy it there since I'm already there. If I'm shopping for something on Amazon it takes basically zero time to look at what the price is on Costco, PC Part Picker, my local stores, etc. and be sure I'm getting the best deal. I'm not a compulsive shopper who just buys things instantly when I see them.
- exhilaration 10y agoAmazon is an online retailer, they are the absolute most vulnerable to cross shopping... The 60 million+ of us that have bought into Amazon Prime are very unlikely to cross shop very often; we've happily locked ourselves into the Amazon ecosystem.
- veridies 10y ago
- uptown 10y agoThe thing I don't get about Amazon is they've allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indicate what's sold is some substandard knock-off. Medical products like thermometers? They're all reviews from people who got the product for free in exchange for writing a review. Their brand is rapidly being tarnished in my view.
- aresant 10y agoVery good point on the "got product free" reviews - seems bizarrely misguided.
- mjg59 10y agoIn the absence of name recognition, it's pretty much the only way small vendors have to differentiate themselves from any of the other vendors selling devices in the same space. The problem is that many of these reviewers end up just giving five stars and then re-selling unopened packages on ebay or craigslist, and many of the vendors expect high score reviews and will pressure reviewers if they don't get them. Blocking all incentivised reviews is one way of dealing with this, but it comes at the cost of it being more difficult to know whether a cheap equivalent from an unknown vendor is worth the savings or not. Some sort of reviewer trust weighting might be more useful here.
- tracker1 10y agoEven weighting reviews on how much the reviewer spends on Amazon per year relative to the product cost would go a long way.
- _wmd 10y agoMailing customers a "3 click questionnaire" some time after purchase might be enough, it seems to work just fine for e.g. delivery food marketplaces.
- sawthat 10y agoAmazon sells Duracel and Energizer as well as super cheap shady crap from China. The same seems to be the case in every category.
- kristopolous 10y agoWasn't the list price being nonsense marketing widely acknowledged? I've had a fantasy of opening up a convenience store with absurd list prices. Candy bar, was $1,200, now only $1.29! Save over $1,100! 99+% off! Maybe have multiple numbers slashed down to get to the final price, etc. Then when the person leaves the store with 5 items I'd say things like "You've saved $94,650 today!"
- eru 10y agoLots of countries actually have laws against this. (But you might get away with it, if it's outrageous enough to be clearly a joke.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dingaling 10y agoIn the UK he would have had to have offered the candy bar for sale at $1,200 for at least 28 contiguous days in the last year. But that's easy enough for retailers to work-around these days when they can ask suppliers for multiple UPCs for the same item
- roymurdock 10y agoMust be how Sports Direct operates. Everything was at least 60% off at all times in that store when I was in the UK 2 years ago.
- westi 10y agoI _think_ you can get away with not selling ever at full price if your comparison price is the manufactures RRP. You can't do this for "bespoke" products which is where the UK law seems to most hit businesses - things like furniture which are specific to the retailer. Of course the $1200 candy bar price is never the RRP :)
- wittekm 10y agoMost likely, they A/B tested it and liked what they saw. Interesting development considering Nordstrom's failure with the same experiment.
- mahranch 10y ago> Interesting development considering Nordstrom's failure with the same experiment. Not really. I think the customer bases are different enough that it's an apples and oranges comparison. Not only do you have a different type of customer on Amazon (people shopping for groceries, or carpentry tools or even computer parts and hygiene products. While on Nordstrom, you have people shopping for not clothing, but high-end clothing.) but the scale itself is on an entirely different level. Amazon has millions of people buying stuff from them every single day. The volume of traffic and orders on Amazon is like comparing the entire economy of the United States with that of Kobe, Japan.
- mdip 10y agoI read this article, puzzled, thinking ... Amazon provides the list price? How haven't I noticed? I had to do an image search to remind me of an example of that. Of course, once I saw the page, I understood what they were referring to but apparently my brain has been filtering that part of the page due to years of conditioning. For all practical purposes, the list price on American e-commerce sites is a worthless bit of information on a product page. I don't think in somewhere around 20 years of purchasing things online and from catalogs I've ever paid anything close to list price and I've never felt like I got a "good deal" simply because the gap between list and actual was large. In fact, I'd probably be disinclined to purchase a product with too large a gap between list and actual, making the assumption that something must be horribly wrong if they're trying to get rid of the thing at such a steep discount. Though I'm very glad this deceptive practice is being targeted, if only from the perspective of eliminating one more useless bit of noise from product pages (can we also filter out the two word reviews?), I'd imagine very few people[0] actually believe that price represents a realistic product price for 99% of products[1]. [0] In the US this is a ridiculously common practice with the worst offenders being auto dealers. They'll list MSRP along-side a nearly impossible to qualify-for manufacturer incentives (unless you're active military, employee of the brand, have the brand's credit card points maxed out, are a previous owner of the brand ... in one case I discovered the discounts couldn't actually be combined making the deal truly impossible) [1] About the only time this is true is when the product provider has a minimum advertised price requiring an extra step to see the price only once the item is in your cart (somehow, that's a loop hole?). Or Apple products...
- bfuller 10y agoI am going to let my prime membership expire for the first time in years because of this. Honestly I think I will miss the video streaming service the most at this point
- bfuller 10y agoI am going to let my prime membership expire for the first time in years because of this. Honestly I think I will miss the video streaming service the most at this point
- christianmann 10y agoDidn't JCPenney try this? Didn't it go very poorly for them?
- colechristensen 10y agoNo, JCPenny went from very frequent "sales" which took "normally" overpriced items and drastically reduced them to a consistent fair priced model. Before this, it wasn't that there was a constant sale... prices went up and down wildly with whatever coupons or sale you could get to work... It turns out that their customers really liked the up and down sales. They went back.
- dsjoerg 10y agoaren't list prices stupid and shouldnt we be glad amazon is getting rid of them?
- lolptdr 10y agoHorrible for the book lovers who like to do price comparison with discount book sellers like Half-Price Books. looks like I'll have to use Barnes-and-Noble or Half.com to get sale prices now.
- kriro 10y agoI have actually come to the conclusion that Amazon has "trapped" me with service not price. I often buy stuff that's a little more expensive on Amazon just because I know I get a reliable shipment and know when it will arrive. The "order until X and we grantee delivery on Y" is one of the key features for me. I always hate guesstimating when things will arrive if they ship in 2-5 days etc. I usually bulk order so stuff arrives on Saturday if they'd have a "worker friendly" shipping service that delivers after 18h I'd be all over that. I'm annoyed by a lot of stuff including the fact that pretty much everything is "reduced price" and that you have to wade through 5* reviews for every product but at the end of the day they are a brand I trust to deliver my stuff on time and do the right thing when there's a problem with some shipment.
- JohnTHaller 10y agoI've found Amazon to be less reliable the sooner it is promised in the last year or so. Amazon's next day delivery will generally either go missing for a couple days or not be delivered at all about 1/2 the time here in NYC (confirmed by a couple other Queens residents). Then you have to wait 48 hours before you can report it missing (despite it saying "delivered" but not being here), then place the lost complaint with service, then wait for the next order which doesn't ship next day. So, about 4 to 5 days for a "next day" delivery. And the last time this happened, 2 out of the 5 items were supposed to reship and I would get a refund and have to re-order 3 of them from said missing package. Except 3 reshipped. So I wound up being charged for and receiving two of one thing I ordered one of. Queue having to get on customer service chat again, package up the duplicate item, walk it over to a shipping location, wait for a refund. For a company that's supposed to be all about logistics, Amazon kind of sucks at logistics.
- mafro 10y agoThought I'd tag my opposing anecdotal data point onto your comment.. I live in London. I've had maybe 50 next day Prime deliveries in the last year - none of which have been late, lost or other. They are very good at logistics for me!
- 10y ago
- known 10y agoI've just noticed AMZN is also filtering/rigging search results e.g. "car battery 45Ah"
- joelthelion 10y agoCould you explain a bit more?
- open-source-ux 10y agoI've noticed on the Amazon UK site that books are discounted far less than they were in the past. Now, only major titles and bestsellers are offered at a discount, anything outside that category has no discount or minimal discount. If you're in the UK, an alternative to Amazon for books is http://www.wordery.com http://www.wordery.com
- amelius 10y agoI just wish we could somehow eliminate this middle man.
- Havoc 10y agoThats why I end up checking the items price history anyway...the list price is meaningless.
- tempodox 10y agoHow many brick-and-mortar shops have “Discount” in their title? That trick is probably as old as capitalism.
- conjectures 10y ago> "Amazon doesn’t have to seduce customers with a deal because they’re going to buy anyway.” If Amazon are so comfortable they don't need to price compete, when can we expect another online department store to get big? I'm not loyal, my £ will go to whoever sells textbooks and bike gear cheapest.
- adventured 10y agoIf Amazon relaxes on pricing, most likely Walmart, Target, BestBuy and similar large retailers will benefit first and foremost. The cost to build out a large selection online retailer is so vast, and the profit margin so mediocre, we're unlikely to see another Amazon-like company in the next 20 years. Amazon's survival was practically a fluke to begin with, the dotcom bubble and the capital it afforded them was the only reason they made it out alive and were able to scale as they did to get out in front of old-line competitors. Had the bubble ended maybe just six months earlier, Amazon goes bankrupt.