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Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
- jjcon 6y agoPre-Covid it wasn’t uncommon to see crazy prices on the amazon marketplace. I remember seeing a 10 year old 256mb MP3 player on amazon marketplace for like $600. You can find most these items for normal prices on amazon too so this seems a bit like making a story where there may not be one.
- nordsieck 6y ago> You can find most these items for normal prices on amazon too so this seems a bit like making a story where there may not be one. My understanding is that there are generally 2 reasons for "outrageous" prices (in normal times). 1. Some vendors specialize in being the seller of last resort. They price their products high and wait out the market until they're the only game in town. This definitely happens with books, although I'd hope that with the advent of ebooks, this will be less viable. 2. Algorithmic pricing gone wrong. Sometimes multiple companies will set their prices on each other's current prices, resulting in gradual price drift.
- ajross 6y agoFamously, the million dollar book feedback loop: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
- onemoresoop 6y agoIt’s amazing that this guy was able to deconstruct this shenanigan. I’ve seen it too on amazon mktplace and was like what? Then forgot about it.
- Alupis 6y ago3. Sellers don't want to deactivate a listing or set their account in "Vacation Mode", so they price it so high nobody sane would buy it. (deactivating listings has an impact on future search visibility and other metrics)
- gowld 6y agoThat sounds more like Amazon bullying sellers than sellers exploiting buyers.
- anewdirection 6y ago4. Money Laundering/proxy buying of drugs. This has happened with everything from bottles of tide, to ingame items in online games, it was no suprise it made it to amazon.
- walshemj 6y agoOr a way to launder money the example of a collectable usb cable.
- hackersword 6y agoAren't some of those examples of some form of money laundering though?
- onemoresoop 6y agoA bit too traceable for money laundering but it could be in some cases
- dawnerd 6y agoMore likely re-pricers going crazy.
- jldugger 6y agoTypically you are laundering cash; electronic systems do not help here since all the means of depositing the cash into the system are monitored.
- jayrot 6y agoNot necessarily. There are different styles and reasons for money laundering. Selling overpriced items (and colluding with buyers) is a good way to "launder" the provenance of money. Works perfectly fine in online, electronic transactions. The clean money comes from legitimate sales.
- jldugger 6y agoHelp me understand how this works. You have a big pile of money from illegal sources. You list fake rare books on Amazon for a million dollars. How are these connected? If you give the dirty money to the "buyer, they need to deposit it in a bank in order to pay Amazon, and will be subject to the normal bank rules. You need someone who can safely pass your money from paper to digital. The only people who can do this are folks with substantial paper money flows. Think cash-only restaurants. They report a modest growth in business, deposit your cash, and "buy" goods and services from you. But you can already fake this as a restaurant supply vendor.
- reaperducer 6y agoA lot of it seems to be seller bots auto-pricing items based on availability. For example, Bounce hasn't made dryer bars for years. But you can find them on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bounce-Dryer-Bar-3-83-Oz/dp/B003VYPKZ2/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=bounce+dryer+bar&qid=1590779538&sr=8-5 https://www.amazon.com/Bounce-Dryer-Bar-3-83-Oz/dp/B003VYPKZ... The store price was around $6. Currently listed on Amazon at $300. But it's not COVID-related. It's had that price for at least a year.
- iratewizard 6y agoThere's a bigger story here. There are a lot of loop holes this article doesn't bring up that people were doing. For example, Chinese garbage thermometers - ones that don't work and cost under a dollar to produce - flooded the marketplace when fever was announced as a common first symptom. Sellers took existing, somewhat well rated products like SD cards and used those listing to push their cheap garbage as $85 premium products. If you didn't look too far into it, it might even look legit. Every related category had Chinese companies performing various scams. Frankly, until Amazon has a county filter it is going to continue trending towards being a bigger wish.com clone.
- vmchale 6y agolife finds a way
- giarc 6y agoWould price gouging not just apply to essential products (with the caveat being 'who determines what is essential')? My city flooded a few years ago and gas stations were selling bottled water for super high prices. I think that's an obvious case of price gouging. However, a dumbbell set that is sold out online, listed for $300. I think you could argue that's just free market at work.
- gowld 6y agoThere's a reputational issue at stake. Would you shop at a store where a bottle of soda cost $1 but every hundredth bottle of the same stuff, or on Tuesdays at 4pm, was marked as $5?
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoFrankly, if I knew during an emergency they’d have soda in stock, yes.
- zhoujianfu 6y agoAgreed. Is it better to have water available for $10 a bottle, or no water available?
- chii 6y ago> no water available? but it's not "no water available", but that the seller knows the value of water has grown due to an unavoidable problem (e.g., natural disaster). And without state intervention, the freemarket is gonna cause the price to skyrocket. As a society, people have decided that it's wrong for price gauging.
- gwd 6y agoOK, but the other side of the coin is this: Water shortages due to unavoidable circumstances happen from time to time. It's good for society to have stockpiles of water in those situations. But here's the thing: storing that excess water isn't free. Water is already commoditized, which means it's low-margin. If you as a private business, stockpile water for an emergency but can't charge more, you're probably selling at a loss. Which means, it's not economically sustainable to stockpile -- which means, absent the government planning ahead, shortages are going to be pretty bad. On the other hand, if you know that you can charge 4x for a bottle of water during an emergency, then you might decide to stockpile, knowing you can make your money back when an emergency happens. So which is worse -- "price gouging" but having the water available, or not having the water available at all? Or to put it a different way: Stockpiling for emergencies is not free, and it's of value to society. Doesn't it make sense to compensate the people who do it?
- toohotatopic 6y agoI still don't understand why price gouging is not accepted. Only high prices are an incentive for new producers to enter a market. Or rather: high prices promise huge return on investments so that investors allocate money for producers to open new production facilities. With fixed prices, there is not enough profit in opening new production lines to balance the risk of entering a new market or spending more money on fast transportation methods. It makes the situation even worse because those with free distribution channels will buy all price-fixed products and leave nothing for Amazon customers.
- rileymat2 6y agoGenerally, I agree with you. But, I am not sure if a momentary shortage is enough to create this incentive years out, when the price will likely normalize. The other reason for high prices beyond inducing more sellers is to be a form of rationing based on ability to pay. And in a crisis with necessities people do not like this method emotionally and prefer a more democratic method.
- WalterBright 6y ago> a form of rationing based on ability to pay That is not rationing.
- rileymat2 6y agoThere is a pedantic argument to be made about the exact definition of rationing, but "rationing based on the ability to pay" as a phrase is a very common description or turn of phrase, Google confirms this.
- WalterBright 6y agoThat isn't how the word is defined. Google the definition of rationing :-) People misuse language all the time, such as using "literally" for emphasis rather than description, but when talking economics one should stick with what the economic terms actually mean. For a more relevant example, "free markets" do not mean you can pickup things at the market at no cost.
- rkagerer 6y agoBut I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me Whoops.
- chiefgeek 6y agoI know they're huge and I'm just pissing in the ocean, but I do just about everything I can these days to buy elsewhere. Several months ago I started ordering from a local bookstore with a lackluster interface and slightly higher prices. Books sometimes take a week or more to arrive (gasp!) and I drive two miles to the shop to pick them up. I've been patronizing Amazon since roughly 1999. No longer. Amazon is a cancer. EDIT: changed "them" to "Amazon" for clarity.
- nojito 6y agoYou can check out Bookshop https://bookshop.org/ https://bookshop.org/ They support local and independent bookstores https://bookshop.org/pages/about https://bookshop.org/pages/about
- reaperducer 6y agoI tried to do this, too. My wife is suddenly into a particular series of books, so at the beginning of the quarantine, I ordered the first four books from Barnes and Noble. Two arrived, but took three weeks. A third arrived in the fourth week. A fourth is nowhere to be found. bn.com won't talk to me without an order number, and I don't have an order number because I recently learned that an iPhone X will not stand up to sitting in a puddle of Lysol on the kitchen counter overnight. Ten days after ordering from Barnes and Noble, I ordered the next nine books in the series from Abe Books. The sellers have been really quick. Most arrived in under a week. A few took ten days. But for $1-$5 apiece, I'm OK with that. More importantly, none got lost.
- decebalus1 6y agoYour problem is that you replaced Amazon with a smaller and shittier version of Amazon. For the past 3 years, I've been buying all my books from a local shop. They're ~$5 more expensive and they arrive in about a week. The clerk (Stacy) calls me personally to tell me I can drop by to pick it up. There was only one instance in which the book was ordered but the distributor dropped the order and the book came 2 weeks later.
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- nelsonenzo 6y agomake it easy for viewers to flag false collectibles, or other rule breaking, and this problem would be near instantly solved.
- throwawaysea 6y agoPrice gouging laws don't make sense: https://fee.org/articles/the-crackdown-on-price-gouging-helps-no-one-except-politicians-and-the-media/ https://fee.org/articles/the-crackdown-on-price-gouging-help... [PDF] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2011/4/regv34n1-1.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regu...
- ChuckMcM 6y agoSellers gonna sell :-). There are a lot of retro computer kits these days, I can imagine next up we'll see, "Vintage KIM-1 Computer kit, shipped using 500 N95 respirator masks as packing material to protect it in shipping, only $6,000"
- carnitas 6y agoCan you provide examples of these kits?
- ChuckMcM 6y agohttps://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/kim-uno-summary-c1uuh https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/kim-uno-summar...
- userbinator 6y agoIn these times, masks are certainly very collectible. ;-)
- ggm 6y agoLaura Ingalls Wilder's father and the feed store during the blizzard?
- Aeolun 6y ago> $279.99 “collectible” Nintendo Switch games that previously went for $79.99. Why would anyone pay this for a switch game they can get from the nintendo store for the original price?
- kodt 6y agoPhysical copy collectors? Oh wait that sounds like a collectible.
- TAForObvReasons 6y agoThe only games that retailed at $79.99 were ring fit adventure (which had a separate joy-con attachment) and some "limited edition" sets for games (which are artificially scarce -- oftentimes there's enough demand for another run)
- exabrial 6y agoSigh... Amazon needs to let prices rise. The market elastic goods is dictated purely by second and third order consequences. When prices go up, people realize there's more money to be made. More sellers/manufacturers enter the marketplace in response, increasing the overall supply pool and eventually causing a price crash. Conversely, limiting prices rewards hoarders as they can justify their actions. It also rewards antisocial actors by constraining supply an increasing the amount of time they can be profitable. Finally it delays the onset of the price crash keeping prices high and making sure the poor can't afford said goods. Also keep in mind stuff like hand sanitizer, lysol wipes, and tp all have replacements. Soap has been shown to be more effective than hand sanitizer, and bleach on a reusable rag is more effective effective than lysol... And for the last one I'll just let you figure it out ;)
- strstr 6y agoPrice gouging does cause users to associate the site with high prices. Particularly when third party sellers aren’t transparent about MSRP. Amazon risks losing customers to physical shops if they become known for being 3x+ as expensive. Amazon could start posting “surge price” ratios ala early Uber, so users can realize what’s going on, but realistically we are in a fairly unusual circumstance at the moment. Most gouging hasn’t lasted long for staples. There’s a bunch of off brand hand sanitizers/masks that have popped up in Seattle. The market has adjusted, and I’m not convinced gouging would have gotten us here faster. The toilet paper I bought is labelled in Korean, which is wacky, but it’s still TP. Producers can read through the lines, and ramp up production. If it was worth doing fewer at a particular price, it’s almost certainly worth doing 2x more at that same price (or, even better, with small reasonable multiplier). If a producer starts charging too much, other brands will eventually pop up to eat their lunch, so I suspect they won’t get too greedy during a short term spike.
- take_a_breath 6y ago== Price gouging does cause users to associate the site with high prices. Particularly when third party sellers aren’t transparent about MSRP. Amazon risks losing customers to physical shops if they become known for being 3x+ as expensive.== If I go to a marketplace in the real world, I don’t associate the vendor’s individual prices with the entity that runs the market. In a real marketplace wouldn’t we expect a vendor to notice the price gouging and take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity? Maybe Amazon isn’t really a marketplace?
- mhb 6y agoAre nurses guilty of ‘price gouging’ for being paid $10,000 per week in NYC, which is significantly higher than normal?: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/are-nurses-guilty-of-price-gouging-for-being-paid-10000-per-week-in-nyc-which-is-500-above-normal/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/are-nurses-guilty-of-price-go...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fulldecent2 6y agoBetter approach is bundling. Hand sanitizer on sale now. Includes a baseball card. $40.
- lazylizard 6y agoHow much does the price increase , in how long a timespan, before its considered gouging? Who gets to decide?