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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

The person who wins the lowest price box is not the lowest price. It is the lowest price who agreed not to sell on other sites for a lower price than one Amazon.

You as the customer are being tricked.

I sell for 15 on Amazon, 10 on my own site and someone else sells the same product for 20 everywhere. Guess what price goes in the buy box. 20.00

"One other thing - as a shopper, no other shopping website comes close to Amazon’s customer service"

Where is the chat button? Where can I ask a question? Where can I let Amazon know something was wrong with the refund they sent?

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>The person who wins the lowest price box is not the lowest price. It is the lowest price who agreed not to sell on other sites for a lower price than one Amazon. You as the customer are being tricked.

There's no dark pattern involved here. When the buy box doesn't show you the lowest price, you usually see something like "Available for a lower price from these sellers" or some wording like that. In my 15+ years as a Prime customer, I've seen this quite a bit where I can find a competing offer for a lower price, often though with a longer delivery time.

>Where is the chat button? Where can I ask a question? Where can I let Amazon know something was wrong with the refund they sent?

I'm going to assume you're not writing this in bad faith and that this isn't a rhetorical question. From Amazon.com, I see "Customer service" is the second link from the left just below the search box. From that page, I see a big box in the center titled "Returns and Refunds".

If you click that it asks you what product. If you select a product that was returned you can't do anything further.

I had a refund where the seller shorted me on the shipping and the refund ended up costing me money. I had no way to contact Amazon.. I would hope for the best customer service they could provide a chat button where I could address an issue like this.

Others sites have a floating chatbox ready to assist you on your purchase. The best customer service should include something similiar, I am right?

> If you click that it asks you what product. If you select a product that was returned you can't do anything further.

The chatbot has always given me an option along the lines of "I still have a question about this", which then connects me to a human. If that option weren't there, I'd simply choose another order so I could reach a human, and then explain the situation to the human.

Amazon, not putting chat button against orders is a very good example of it not being customer focused. Amazon should not be taken seriously when it claims that it's the most customer focused company on the planet.

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