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Comment by somethingwitty1 | Hacker News Reader

This goes both ways. Numerous people (companies?) have setup arbitrage businesses. They post products on Amazon at a markup over Walmart and vice-versa. They leverage the APIs to dynamically adjust their prices based on how the prices move on each store. It technically isn't a rip-off, when you think about it. They are taking advantage of people not searching for the best deal. You get what you ordered, they make money from scouting prices and putting at a price you are willing to pay for said product (I assume otherwise you wouldn't order).

Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.

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When I was an undergrad, me and buddy had what amounted to an arbitrage scheme (I didn't realize that was the name for it back then)selling laptops on campus. We would buy them from ebay, and sell them to local students with posters on physical bulletin boards around campus. At some point, the market flipped, and we could no longer turn a profit this way. So we started buying student's laptops on campus and selling them on ebay.

It's fine if you think markets are intended to be hostile to consumers instead of bettering people's lives. I don't think incentivizing deceptive middlemen is really a net benefit to society.

Personally I don't think it is either, but people need money to exist in this world, and we can't all be researching the cure for cancer.

Just noting that’s a very profitable business.

Perhaps not everyone can research cures for cancer, but that's not a good reason to then become the "cancer". Just because it's how it is now, doesn't mean that's how it has to be. Ideally Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc.. should manage their marketplaces better to provide a optimal consumer experience, but it seems so long as they get their cut, they couldn't care less. The continued consolidation of competition leaves fewer options for consumers to even "vote with their wallets".

Welcome to capitalism, where everyone is trying to rip off everyone else and everyone has to defend themselves against everyone else.

Definitely don’t recommend.

> You get what you ordered

Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.

Boycotting Amazon and buying at Walmart seems strange. The moral reasons are there in both cases.

Amazon is the biggest eCommerce retailer, so trying to prevent a monopoly is a moral reason.

Amazon also has a lot of famous worker safety/treatment issues for their delivery drivers and warehouse workers. I doubt they are unique in the fulfillment space, but they are extremely well publicized. Walmart has issues as well, but their publicized issues were in stores. Walmart online avoids the worst publicized worker treatment issues.

It really is, I remember when my wife hated Wal-Mart for doing the same things she doesn't like Amazon doing. But apparently she now feels that Wal-Mart is the lesser of two evils so she doesn't mind shopping there.

In my mind Wal-Mart is actually the evil one, I watched them destroy entire towns in the 80s. Everyone ended up working there, full time if they were lucky, and they gave all their money back every week because there was nowhere else in town left to spend it.

Buy the time Amazon came around the destruction was over. What Amazon did was raise the bar on customer service so high that everybody else had to follow. That is a net positive I believe.

It hardly matters if what your wife wants to do was correct. The point is, she's trying to pay money (and is in fact spending the money) to try to cut Amazon out. And she's not getting what she's paying for.

I was going to say "arbitrage." I thought of the pizza place guy who discovered that DoorDash or GrubHub was charging customers less than they paid him. Promoting the delivery business, you know.

So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.

I remember this also being a thing with eBay as well. Not sure why someone would go to eBay first and not check Amazon, but then again some people still pay for AOL.

I have noticed a number of inexpensive small items (say < ~$7) being cheaper including shipping on eBay compared to Amazon.

So they don't have to pay for prime

ebay's cheaper than Amazon, that's why.

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