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Enjoyed this read, reading the comments section makes me wonder how many people have silently made money over the years arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms such as
by yomly 9y ago
Enjoyed this read, reading the comments section makes me wonder how many people have silently made money over the years arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms such as this.
Also reminds me of local competitor retailers exploiting Amazon's policies + algorithms to incur cost at Amazon: Amazon promises the lowest price for game pre-orders, and retailers would deliberately drop the price for a game hours before launch, forcing Amazon to honour the low price for all pre-orderers.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago> arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms How would you arb this?
- agumonkey 9y agoarb means arbitrage ?
- dmoy 9y agoYes
- leereeves 9y agoIf there's only two copies on offer and you believe the higher priced seller is planning to buy from the other: Buy the book from the lower priced seller, list it for sale at a much higher price, and order it from the higher priced seller before they change the price. I wouldn't risk a million dollars on that strategy, though.
- kakarot 9y agoWould a good tip-off be that the higher-priced seller won't have two-day shipping enabled?
- patch_collector 9y agoNot necessarily -- if the first seller has it enabled, the second seller would just order it to be shipped directly from the first seller to the buyer, and never have it touch their inventory. Fun story! A family member wanted to buy an air-fryer online. She found it on Walmart's site, then found it for $20 more on amazon. At first she tried to buy it from Walmart, but got frustrated with the process (setting up an account and stuff) and so she just went and paid the extra to order it from amazon. A few days later, she gets an air fryer in a Walmart box! At first she's super confused, and thought she'd mistakenly bought it from Walmart, so she went to cancel it from Amazon, and saw that that one had already arrived. What had happened was the Amazon seller was getting orders on their page, then immediately going to Walmart, ordering the fryer, then shipping it directly to the recipient. Kinda genius. Basically no overhead, no stock, just acting as a hidden walmart portal and pocketing a percentage.
- kakarot 9y agoI really want to know how much that person banks because I will quit my day job right now.
- EGreg 9y agoWait, the second seller wouldn't be able to set the buyer's address for the first seller at checkout. At least, Amazon doesn't have such features -- the seller would have to manually add the buyer's address to their own list of addresses and so on. There is no easy "drop shipping" between sellers like that. I am saying this because I wanted to do drop shipping with sellers on Amazon, to arbitrary addresses via an api. How can it be done?
- ikeboy 9y agozinc api