If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon won’t sell you "The Last Jedi" | Hacker News Reader

If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon won’t sell you "The Last Jedi"

slate.com

25 pointssmacktoward35 comments

Amazon has definitely become less consumer focused.

For two other examples, they used to price match themselves, then it was only in the last 30 days, and now they just refuse unless you ship the product back and ask for a refund/re-order.

But worse still, and nobody seems to have noticed this, Amazon has removed the "Buying this elsewhere" from their Wish Lists. This started on Amazon (UK) but has no been deployed to Amazon.com. That means that if someone is using an Amazon Wish List your choices are either: Spoil the surprise, or buy it from Amazon. That's even true if you buy the product from Amazon but a different version/edition it doesn't match with the exact Wish List one (or forgot to add it via the Wish List).

The "Buying this elsewhere" is still listed in Amazon's help[0], so I provided screenshots showing what it now looks like[1]. Consequentially I'm now looking for an alternative Wish List vendor I can recommend to friends and family that does provide a "I purchased this elsewhere" option.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/b6KDNqt.png

I've almost managed to avoid Amazon over the past 12 months or so. There are plenty of alternatives, and I've found the alternatives much more reliable, and delivery times and communication much better.

In addition, the alternatives are often far cheaper; books, especially.

I kind of regard Amazon as a hostile business these days. If I have to buy something from them, I feel like I need to wear gloves and wash my hands after.

What alternatives do you use for books? I'm dying to find an excuse to let my Amazon Prime account lapse.

Mostly, I use Abe.

FYI, Abebooks is a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon.com

The article suggests this is to a business spat with competitors in the video space, but that misses the overall reality of Prime-only items: That Amazon regularly and arbitrarily marks large swaths of items as Prime exclusive for no other reason than to force people into subscribing to Prime. This can include older Blu-rays that aren't hot items at all, to regular daily items like diapers and shaver blades.

If you try and add a Prime exclusive item to your cart and check out, they'll automatically add the Prime subscription cost to your cart. This is really the sole purpose of this maneuver. And given that it's been recently said that Prime has over 100 million subscribers, this dark pattern seems to work pretty well.

It almost makes me want to cancel my prime subscription that I've had for 8 years. I really hate rewarding companies for this kind of behavior.

This is why I refuse to remain a Prime subscriber. I do use the monthly plan once or twice a year (particularly the Christmas shopping season), when I know I can advantageously receive a massive amount of value out of it.

(If you have Prime and buy a new $60 video game, you get like $14 off, so buying Prime for a month if you're going to buy a game is pretty much free.)

Not being a Prime subscriber has afforded me often finding cheaper prices elsewhere. I buy from Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Newegg, etc.

As for when I do shop Amazon: I wait until I have an order big enough for free shipping, which often means I am more hesitant to buy things rapidly and have more time to consider my purchases, it keeps my spending down overall.

This has definitely made me shop much more often with Walmart, Best Buy and eBay

At this point I wish Amazon would convert entirely to Prime-only and remove any last reason for people to casually shop there. Bonus points if the whole website went behind a login.

But they won't as since you point out they can probably gain baseline + n by tempting those n people into their parlour and then up-selling.

I think these types of tactics should be viewed as evidence that Prime isn't worth it. If it provided good value for the money, customers would be more than willing to sign up voluntarily.

I had been a Prime subscriber ever since a few months after it started. Several years ago Amazon became a lot less competitive on price for low priced items if you didn't actually need it in two days (essentially they charge for shipping by charging higher prices). So I used Amazon a lot less and less, except for the times I actually needed something in two days. I finally cancelled when 10 out of the last 10 items I ordered showed up late. So, I basically paid more for an item, paid for a Prime subscription, and got no benefit.

Amazon is still fairly competitive on price for more expensive items. But those qualify for free shipping anyway.

My read on this is that it's Amazon taking another step towards their long-term endgame in retail.

Amazon is one of the few companies out there that thinks in the long term. Like the Cylons in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, they Have A Plan. And in retail, that plan has been to leave money on the table in order to build the biggest, most loyal customer base possible -- until such a time as their position in the marketplace was unassailable, at which point they would flip the switch and start milking those loyal customers for all they were worth.

I wrote a little bit about the first signs that the switch had flipped a couple of years ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/07/amazon-the-screw-begins-t...

> Why would you need to pay for Prime if the free shipping they offer to everyone already works fine for you? It’s a good question. To which Amazon’s easiest answer would be to simply change the free shipping so that it doesn’t work fine for you so much anymore. Suddenly you have a reason to shell out those ninety-nine smackers...

> Amazon has spent twenty years now attracting shoppers with goodies like fast, free shipping. But businesses don’t give out goodies without expecting to make money off them at some point; so fast, free shipping quietly becomes a choice: fast shipping, or free shipping. “Customer delight” becomes “fulfillment operations” to be “optimized.”

Not disagreeing with your point. But a fun bit of trivia. The Cylons never actually had a plan in the show. According to creator Ronald D Moore, they intended to come up with something later, but never did.

Hee. Yeah, by the middle of season 3 or so it was clear that the BSG writer's room had a big banner hanging in it that read "FIGURE IT OUT LATER."

I am not supporting a side here. But what exactly is the practical or moral issue with this? Is it that Amazon is squeezing money out of people who want the movie but probably won't use the Prime service otherwise? Is it false advertising where Amazon claims to cater to everyone, but you really only benefit if you use their Prime service?

It's just a terrible way to treat your customers, that's all.

I get having exclusive discounts/pricing. But when you say "subscribe or go elsewhere, we won't sell this to you"... I go elsewhere.

It feels like Amazon has moved very far away from the "focus on the customer" approach they used to have. They should never be giving me a reason to buy from a different store.

You cannot go elsewhere for digital exclusives or very new releases; unless by elsewhere you mean to violate copyright.

I was specifically speaking of physical items you can generally buy at other retailers, like Blu-ray discs or diapers. Most "Prime exclusive" items are sold elsewhere. Like Best Buy.

One of the months I was forced to get Prime and was very angry about it, was that Amazon chose to make an "Amazon exclusive" Amiibo also "Prime exclusive". So Nintendo only sold it to Amazon, and Amazon only sold it to Prime members. If I didn't want to pay six times the cost on eBay, I had to get Prime.

I see where you are coming from. I would assume the pricing/exclusivity of items are optimized so that they can push their profits the highest they can go without alienating too many people. I guess this goes to show how important consumer behavioral data is.

It smells like a negotiated co-promotion.

The only problem here is that Amazon is so big that it's newsworthy what they choose to sell or not.

We should have healthy competition, so that when Amazon chooses not to sell some product, it's merely Amazon's loss, not an assault on a manufacturer.

They use similar deceptive practices with Audible. You can't cancel your account without losing the credits you have already paid for. I believe this works so well because people wishing to cancel probably have unused credits but when they go to actually cancel they will have to think twice before giving up their credits or searching for some books they want and then cancelling.

So what; Costco won't sell you a can of beans if you aren't any kind of member.

Costco won't sell you anything if you're not a member, so it's not a good analogy.

It's more as if Target would refuse to sell you a certain size of diapers unless you sign up for their credit card membership thingy.

Nothing wrong with the analogy; the Prime membership is like a little Costco nested within Amazon.

Costco could run a parallel retail outfit (also visibly Costco branded, like "Costco Open" or something) where anyone can walk in and buy anything, but not some things that are available only in regular Costco.

That's a stretch. Even then, the analogy would only work if they stocked "Costco Open" with premium products and then if you had one in your cart, they tacked on the membership fee to your total price.

Most Costcos will actually sell alcohol to nonmembers, as a probably unintended result of some states' old blue laws.

In some Costco locations non-members can get into the food court area to buy Costco fast food. This is outside of the cash registers and the food vendors don't check memberships.

Interesting, in Mexico, Costco does check for membership at the food court, but I think they don't at the pharmacy.

Costco also allows non-members to buy from their pharmacy.

I guess the better analogy would be video games that are exclusive to a console ie. playstation exclusive or xbox exclusive.

Software usually has a technical reason for not running on a platform it's not targetted for.

There is an analogy here though: like a site refusing to run after detecting that your browser is running on Linux, such that if you fake that string, everything works fine.

> Software usually has a technical reason for not running on a platform it's not targeted for.

Not true. Many years ago Atari patented a little cartridge flap just so no one else could make a cartridge that could be inserted into their platform. There are many other examples.

This is actually wrong. You can order off their website for an additional surcharge.

"Non-members may be assessed an additional surcharge for purchases (does not apply to prescription items)."

I don't think anyone is saying that Amazon isn't within their power to do this. Just that it's a shitty thing to do. Especially when adding a prime exclusive item adds a prime membership to your cart automatically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com