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Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)
- tomcam 6y agoI assure you that book is only worth about $21,000,000
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway413 6y agoPence: “Sold”
- IncRnd 6y agoThis happens all the time on Amazon. Just search for a product, like shirt, and then change the sorting from "relevance" to "high to low". For this particular search at this time there is a nice women's $2,000 Nike tee shirt.
- saalweachter 6y agoIn general, sorting by anything but "relevance" is just a way to find bad data, like sorting TVs by size and finding a TV which reinterpreted its size from mm to inches or vice versa and now seems to be an absurdly large or small TV, on paper. It's not even spamminess in this case, just bad data.
- H8crilA 6y agoMakes one appreciate the effort that's put into the "relevance" scoring. It's probably >100 engineers working in Amazon on just this core ranking problem.
- lukevp 6y agoTuning relevance is extremely difficult, and it’s not just an information retrieval problem - at Amazon’s size (and even smaller companies) a lot of what you see for “relevance” is hand-tuned by humans, through machine learning on longer-tail queries, and some combination of both in the middle (with sponsored or high margin or velocity items weighting more heavily). If you search for something like “men’s shoes” there’s 0% chance you’re getting a search result, it’s going to be a curated result page. Lots of people work on this hand tuning, but they’re not engineers, they’re product and marketing people. If you search for “men’s shoes with green laces” you’ll see the real challenge, with a top 10 search result that’s not even shoes (it’s a pack of laces).
- saalweachter 6y agoSome of my favorite test queries for shopping sites (from back when I used to work on a comparison shopping engine: [apples to apples] -> frequently returns random "Apple" products, because when you dedupe, stem and remove stopwords from that query, you're left with "apple", and Apple products are big ticket items. [shirt dress] -> frequently returns dress shirts, because many sites essentially ignore word order or the notion of compound words. [fish swim vest] -> frequently returns fishing vests, partially because of overstemming (many POS stemmers will stem "fishing" -> "fish", but in a product search setting, it's usually the wrong thing to do).
- H8crilA 6y agoHere's one that's fun if your objects of interest include cities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best,_Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best,_Netherlands What's the [best city in europe]? Obviously "Best, Netherlands".
- srtjstjsj 6y agoIf your discard outliers you get usable data.
- saalweachter 6y agoThat helps, but you also have a lot of bad data at the extremes that are still within the bounds of plausibility. For instance, nine out of ten 122" TVs might actually be 12.2" TVs that got misinterpreted or typo'd to 122", because small TVs are so much more common than large TVs that there can be more malformed small TVs than well formed large TVs, but you can't necessarily discard all of the 122" TVs as outliers, because there are actually valid TVs in that range as well.
- 1f60c 6y agoThe other day, I found a household appliance (I don't remember what kind), that boasted 16 gigs of RAM.
- IncRnd 6y agoHaha! That's crazy! Though, it does point out that many listings may have been created by copy&paste, leaving them with incorrect information.
- mjcohen 6y agoProbably a refrigerator. A washing machine only takes 8 gig.
- IncRnd 6y agoRefrigerator Repairing And Servicing, Memory Size: 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/refrigerator-repairing-and-servicing-17772684962.html https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/refrigerator-repairing-...
- amichal 6y agoI talked once to a dev who does this sort of thing. Its common. It's also interesting to consider what options folks have for quick, easy short-circuit algorithms. Any ideas for clever hacks to prevent the totally absurd with minimal state retention needed? When I started talking about moving averages and trend related metrics, the person I was talking to commented that they where doing this in Excel or an Access database and wouldn't know how to handle that with say 250,000 books they might know or care about... then again maybe the downside of having one random crazy price is not even worth a cheap hack.
- ikeboy 6y agoThere's a whole ecosystem of SaaS doing this fairly priced for smaller sellers, along with unfairly priced SaaS for large sellers (some take a percentage or more of revenue). Anyway for repricing just have a hard max of 1k or so, and lower prices if it doesn't sell after six months and again after a year, two years, etc.
- sokoloff 6y agoWhat makes the SaaS pricing manager unfairly priced?
- ikeboy 6y agoHaving used one briefly (Feedvisor) several years ago, they attach a very heavy handed enterprise sales operation to a mediocre platform. A single digit percentage of sales is insane. I got calls every few months for years afterwards trying to get me to try them again. They raised $30M+ and built out a strong sales team.
- sokoloff 6y agoThat sounds like it was priced higher than you cared to pay. I don’t find Ferraris unfairly priced; I just don’t buy them because they are too high priced for my preferences.
- zapstar 6y agoWhile working on my side project [0], I regularly find some pretty outlandish prices on Amazon. This post makes me want to add further analysis on 3rd party prices and how they relate to one another. [0] https://unitprice.org https://unitprice.org
- Scoundreller 6y agoAwesome side project. Amazon.ca next!
- zapstar 6y agoThank you! One day I hope to expand beyond the US Amazon!
- ksaj 6y agoI once saw a regular cd from Yngwie Malmsteen for several thousand dollars. It wasn't even rare. Left me wondering what the purpose of that was.
- polynomial 6y agoTo drive up the "average price" shown to customers by the algorithm, of course.
- Semaphor 6y ago3 threads about it, all +- 100 comments: 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247254 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854
- 082349872349872 6y agoHow often may the price change? That might make a nice covert channel.
- varispeed 6y agoI noticed that after I bought some old less known books for < $50, few weeks later they would cost over $1000. I think to myself that now for the amount these books are worth I could buy myself a condo in the Caribbean. Joking of course. This type of bot pricing is very irritating. Sometimes when I want to buy a book for research I need to wait a lot for it to have a normal price if someone bought it before me.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI know ebay now let’s you “pause” listings; but they didn’t used to. If you discontinued your listing, it was eventually lost forever; so the best way to pause your listing was to just set a ridiculous price. I have a listing like this for some tiny screws that I seem to have lost, but might one day find.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoBoth Amazon and eBay have vacation modes that have been around for as long as I can remember.
- kombucha111 6y agoYeah but vacation still presents the listing and allows purchase.
- charred5 6y ago"Vacation Settings" for Amazon sellers doesn't show the listing to buyers, except when it's Fulfilled by Amazon. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=200135620&language=en-US&ref=mpbc_200219380_cont_200135620 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=20... eBay seems to have a similar option with "Pause item sales": https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/ebay-stores/manage-ebay-store?id=4090 https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/ebay-stores/manage-ebay-st...
- kens 6y ago
- sambull 6y agoThis is fairly normal, Edition 5 is going out of stock when Edition 6 is released. Some famous youtuber puts a link to Edition 5 and drives demand/traffic on the item, and boom $50 manual becomes $5,000. Edition 6 is still $50.
- jungletime 6y agoWayfair Consipracy? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247
- manaskarekar 6y agoOff topic but it reminds of the book by Jack Stratton called "How I made $290,000 selling books" priced at $290,000. Couldn’t find the original listing. The author is a member of Vulfpeck, pretty fun band. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_290000_selling_books/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...
- ehnto 6y agoVulpeck also made some noise with their album Sleepify, which was an album of silent tracks they used to game Spotify's pay for plays model. It made them ~$20,000 before Spotify took it down. https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-silent-album-that-earned-indie-band-20000 https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoEpic. I love malicious compliance in the face of dictatorial companies.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThat's a funny way of saying fraud. Do you also love companies that send boxes of sawdust or online store customers ?
- staticautomatic 6y agoI think this is more in the vein of Cards Against Humanity shenanigans.
- bombastry 6y agoIt's a lot more like the fraud attempted in Office Space (... and Superman 3). Spotify artist payments are not based on play counts directly. They are actually based on Spotify's total revenue and the proportion of global Spotify streams that the artist received. As a result of these extra plays, Vulpeck's stream rate increases, but Spotify gets virtually no extra revenue (especially since a user would have to be a premium subscriber to get a fully quiet experience listening to the album). Vulpeck gets paid a bit more, and everyone else gets paid a minuscule amount less. For reference, here's one article that mentions this model of how Spotify pays its artists: https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-artists-isnt-fair/ https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
- Hokusai 6y agoIt makes sense. There is no much cost for such a mistake. Some team somewhere has a "correct overprice bug" low in the priority of their backlog of tasks. Have you found many books that you wanted priced at $0?
- unstatusthequo 6y agoSome outlandish prices are for money laundering etc. Not this one maybe. Seller is known cohort of buyer. For the Amazon sales fee, they get to transfer funds and get a great item at the same time.
- trident1000 6y agoTheres a lot of predatory pricing now with these algos (not in the legal/official sense of the phrase which is to undercut competitors). For instance I noticed that I was being charged 6x compared to others for something that I frequently bought on an app.
- boyadjian 6y agoIt is a more general problem on Amazon, and in other internet resellers. Products are proposed at insane price, and stay there during month or years, waiting for a dumb buyer. This is annoying, because when you browse Amazon looking for something interesting, you are polluted with all theses dumb offers.
- jldugger 6y agoWhat should happen is that another supplier steps in to disrupt the equilibrium towards the 'correct' price. Which is the case today -- instead of two sellers there are 15.
- mrtnmcc 6y ago> Why though would bordeebook want to make sure theirs is always more expensive? This would seem to guarantee they would get no sales. But maybe this isn’t right – they have a huge volume of positive feedback – far more than most others. And some buyers might choose to pay a few extra dollars for the level of confidence in the transaction. Alternatively bordeebook may be focused on when the competing book sells out (these are used book listings on Amazon which are single units). Then they will be the only alternative, and at a 27% markup. Books also often get bought in bursts (group sales, class assignment, labs, book clubs), so this might be reasonable purchase pattern prediction.
- jjeaff 6y agoYes, this is how I used to price my books. There are two reasons to price higher than the lowest. One is to make a little more profit because your book will sell as soon as the cheapest book sells. The other is to avoid my pricing bot fighting with someone else's pricing bot down to $0.01. I would rather accidentally shoot the price really high than give the book away for a loss. Especially considering a lot of the books were $150+ used textbooks.
- celias 6y agoThere was the $1k "I Am Rich" iPhone app that just put up an image of a glowing gem. The price was set by the author as a work of art so it's not directly related to the amazon book prices. 8 people bought it according to the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
- 6510 6y agoNext time someone asks how markets work (art, housing, stocks etc) ill point them here. The most mind boggling is that no one is to blame. Our system has gone nuts. We can hope someone will lower these prices out of greed but that is optimistically assuming they even have the books. It seems more like each system has a finite life span that we barely understand until we see it expire.
- andi999 6y agoThis reminds me of a story going around at the chemical department here (probably it is false). Graduate student was told by prof to synthesize a substance. Process is well known, but it is tedious, he would have to spend the next two month in the lab. Since this guy was resourceful he called up privately one of their chemical suppliers and ask if he can order this substance from them. They send him a quote and he ordered it. A few days later his prof comes in, and said: "can you synthesize a bit more, the company we sometimes take assignment from has a customer who also needs it"....
- dtech 6y agoIf true that's very funny, but also would either mean the student is very rich or their time is sold at an abysmal wage.
- pmiller2 6y agoAlmost certainly the latter, considering grad students are paid practically slave wages.
- antics 6y agoThis is true, kind of. The original source is Peter Norvig's speech to Berkeley's graduating CS students in 2006. > Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663: beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we need to age it in oak casks for five years." http://www.norvig.com/speech.html http://www.norvig.com/speech.html
- croes 6y agoI have experienced this myself on a smaller scale. I was looking for an old book but all the sellers wanted $80 or more. One day the prices started to fall with two suppliers, always a few cents every few hours. In the end I got the book for about $10.
- 1f60c 6y agoI had hoped this would be about a book about flies that was genuinely worth $23 million.
- dmurray 6y agoI wonder could you exploit this if you're the company who has the book. Buy it as a normal user from the other company for $23 million. They buy your copy for $22 million. Wait until the end of the returns window (assuming Amazon enforce one) and return it for $23 million. They try to return it to you, but it's too late. Probably the bookshop notices something is wrong on the $23 million item, but maybe you could make a few thousand this way.
- warrenq 6y agoclearly someone doesn't know about counterparty risk
- codecutter 6y agoI have noticed such pricing tactics with Udemy. I typically buy courses for $10-12 range, but they frequently show me courses around $94-$136 range. (especially when I am logged in my account).
- tigger0jk 6y agoThe steam marketplace also has algorithmic traders (despite being against TOS to automate marketplace interactions). I found myself in a position where there was only one other listing for a limited time discontinued item that I had bought a few of. I bought the other one so I could set the market price (gouging sure but there wasn't any demand so still risky). Another one was listed within 15 minutes. I bought that one too, steam only reveals to you who the seller is after a purchase (and it was the same seller). I wasn't convinced it was a bot and not just someone paying close attention to their steam account until I realized they would under-list me every 5 minutes or so. Since there was no activity on that item, and no buy orders, I experimented by listing my item lower and lower, and they kept undercutting me, down to a floor. Their floor ended up being pretty low (around an 85% loss on what they originally bought at), and after I bought at the floor they then re-listed another for double that, before slowly declining again to under-cut me. For an item with no demand, I decided not to try to slowly buy out their entire inventory at the algo's floor. I found other items that bot was also trading (after I bought them) and discovered that they also change their listing prices based on where people have buy orders set (a good indicator of some demand / market value), so their floor is higher on an item with any demand at all.
- leephillips 6y agoSo could you drive down the price of something you want to buy by offering the same item (that you don’t actually have) at a low price?
- tigger0jk 6y agoOn steam you have to actually HAVE the item in order to list it, but if you buy one (and wait for a 7-day re-listing period), you can start an undercutting war with some bots yeah if the item has low or no demand.
- tait 6y agoI bought a copy of this. Would be willing to sell it for $19M.