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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
by strstr 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.
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?
- macNchz 6y agoI’d be curious to know what proportion of Amazon shoppers actually grok the fact that Amazon is a marketplace of many sellers. I was a longtime Prime member until last year, and spent a good amount of time discussing my concerns about the platform with family and friends before ultimately canceling. My impression from those conversations is that many folks just see Amazon as “Amazon” and have no real concept of who they’re actually buying from. A physical market in the real world makes it incredibly obvious who you’re shopping with, and that it’s independent of the marketplace itself. Amazon’s UI is clearly designed not to make this distinction, so marketplace seller behavior reflects more on the Amazon brand than it might otherwise.
- take_a_breath 6y agoSounds like another example of Amazon wanting to look like a marketplace (for regulatory reasons?) but not necessarily act like one.