How Amazon Tricks You into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices
recode.net
recode.net
Nope. Retailers are just gaming us 24/7. I've become very aware of all the different timeframes retailers offer post-purchase price-matches (published at http://blog.trackif.com/trackif-smart-shopping-guide-store-p... since I felt like I was hoarding knowledge.)
Have retailers always played games like this? Or it just a side-effect of sales moving online?
Interested if you get more profit from demanding sign-in before you'll let people follow your Amazon links. Have you tried just using referrer links - presumably you do it this way on the basis that long term association gains enough to let one-time users abandon and skip direct to the site for purchase??
Interesting site, would definitely try it if there were a localised version for UK, anyone know of something similar for UK sites??
Presumably though Amazon do per-user pricing too?
Works for Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, US. Historical price information anything where someone's looked them up at least once - which basically means everything, except super-super-tail items.
It's pretty amusing to see how much the price fluctuates over time - probably tracking other stores' special deals and so on.
I mostly use it to buy games: set a price track alert when they come out, tell the site to email me when they hit £20 a year or two later.
* The "sign-in before you'll let people follow" is just a straight forward result of A/B testing. It was like a 9-to-1 difference for single site returns. And despite the developer in me saying "gross", it was just a stat from our metrics guy that we couldn't refute.
* We're in Minnesota and Amazon's been playing games with our affiliate revenue to encourage some legislative changes... But even if the affiliate revenue was working perfect, it wouldn't be enough to keep the lights on. TrackIf is really just a platform to demonstrate our business solution (like how Home Depot does back-in-stock notifications)
* What's a UK based site you want tracked? I could wire it up for you.
* Amazon does all sorts of price games, geography/time-on-site /Prime-status/etc.
I use a similar site for building computers.
www.pcpartpicker.com and I love these guys. I use to go straight to NewEgg but after finding pcpartpicker, I now go there first. I'm not sure how they monetize the site but they won me over by not requiring me to sign up.
I'm too lazy to create a one off email address just to see if the site is worth it or not.
Also, I couldn't tell from your site if it's possible to enter a SKU and have the site notify me of where I could purchase it and what price history there was on it which I think would be awfully cool.
As an example, I really want to purchase a festool router but these are considered the best-of-the-best and their price reflects this and so in a manual way, I've been watching their prices on a couple web sites for sales.
Love the concept and everything else about the idea!
Another idea is if you can find users who all want to buy the same thing and see if you can leverage this to get volume discounts. I recently been playing with a site called massdrop that attempts to pull this off.
Also, when are you going to add an Android app that does barcode scanning?
* Marking items up 30-45 days ahead of a big sale. This allowed our price to be 25% off instead of 10%. Or sometimes, our sale price probably should have been the regular price. This happened all the time, and people fell for it hard. Usually this would happen before a 10% off everything sale.
* Price adjustments from competitive shops. All of a sudden on some non-advertised sale day the laser printer would spit out a new low every day price if a strategic product was priced above the competition.
* Some price adjustments occurred to game the competition. We did this a lot with appliances where we'd mark up a model we knew the manufacturer had a ton of inventory. The competition would buy a few truckloads and then we'd run $200 off when they ran their $100 off add.
The only thing the internet has changed is the speed price changes occur and has enabled some other kinds of buy this get that deals.
According to my friends that have worked furniture retail, it was common practice to mark everything up 300% for a week then have a "40-60% Off!!!" sale. Customers would be very excited about how much money they were "saving" even though the reality was that they were buying at a net markup compared to a few weeks ago. But, a few weeks ago the shop was much, much quieter even though the prices were lower. So, what's a shopkeeper to do?
So they pitch it like a sale but really they will just offer whatever is left of their product at a higher price for a while in some store or maybe just online.
They finally went out of business last year. The business that replaced them was another furniture store which happened to be owned by the same people the owned the first. What gives with that anyways, is that some sort of tax gaming?
They try to get the most money out of you while you try to spend as little as you can.
Yes, its all very shocking.
In running PricePlow (https://www.priceplow.com), I can say that our products (vitamins / supplements / protein) are complete and total chaos on Amazon. They clearly don't care about this corner of the market and let the marketplace stores run wild.
Despite some of the monumental volume that some of these products have, their listings are nothing short of unorganized disaster. There are definitely places where Amazon could (and should) have better pricing, but is actively neglecting it - and so are the marketplace stores for various reasons.
But that said, over the past half dozen plus years of doing this, there's been a huge, distinct shift towards deeper trust in Amazon.
In some of our smaller PricePlow-driven sites, when in doubt with where to send traffic (like if a product is out of stock or the price is a tie), I used to send them to Bodybuilding. Now, that's no more - the demographic is still cautious, but far more friendly to buying on Amazon... mostly for the reasons stated here in this discussion.
A lot of the industry hasn't figured that out yet, so it's been an interesting transition.
End of the day, from what I've seen, Amazon is a mess and could be doing a lot better with certain segments, but still does well despite their worst efforts. They're heading towards unstoppable status.
(Amazon price tracking.) Very useful if/when you want to buy something and want to check historical prices. (You can also set email alerts when something drops to below a certain price.)
Edit: linkified. (Thanks, canvia!)
http://camelcamelcamel.com/Stash-Tea-Green-Chai-Count/produc...
The price rapidly fluctuates between $18.99 and $14.24 on a nearly monthly basis. In this case it's worth it to create an alert and wait a week or two for the price to drop again.
Amazon and its sellers do A/B testing of price points all day long, and if you're just a casual shopper that happens to want the product at that time specific time, you may end up being unlucky, and paying a few bucks (or sometimes dozens) more.
My main worry is time wasted from ordering something and having it not show up. You have to email them. You have to listen to how sorry they are. Then they send it again. Maybe it shows up. At some point you cut your losses and just order it from Amazon for $2.13 more. Admittedly I've gone through the order anti-loop with Amazon and got four bicycle tires for free (never getting the ones I actually ordered), but that was one case out of hundreds, and it didn't cost me much money or time. Amazon is predictable: that's why I buy from them.
There's a certain premium I'm willing to pay to have it all handled by one reliable company, as long as they're not charging too much.
Another commenter mentioned that Monoprice's HDMI quality has declined; I haven't noticed any problem with their Ethernet and USB cables.
For HDMI, Monoprice goes all the way down to $2: http://www.monoprice.com/Search/Index?keyword=hdmi
Best Buy preys on the 'I need this cable in 30 minutes for the big presentation' customer, and prices accordingly. Try buying coaxial cable - it's obscene!
Case in point, I bought a new router from Amazon last week. When I got it I realised I'd made a mistake (I'd chosen one without an ADSL modem). I fill in a simple online form to get the return label, return it via Collect+ (it's a service in the UK for collecting parcels from local stores) and Amazon process my refund whilst the item was in transit (before the item got back to their warehouses). This is typical of their customer service, it's really second to none (in my experience).
It's not about just following the letter of the law, it's about the small details that add up to a better experience, that's what I was trying to get across.
Aside from the 'refund before the item was returned' example, I could also point to when I'd had to speak to Amazon customer support before, all done through instant messaging on the website with one of their team. Resolved within minutes. Contrast with other retailers where there's a back and forth with emails. Again, not horrible with other retailers, but the Amazon experience was more streamlined.
They refunded my money on an accidentally purchased Amazon instant video with no trouble as well.
And they've waive charges at AWS too when warranted to keep customers happy. Keep lowering the prices and upgrading the hardware without being asked too.
Amazon is not the cheapest. Amazon is trusted and easy to deal with. And you can't find a comparable service for the same price.
For me what gives me the impression amazon has the lowest prices are their nearly nonexistent profits. Whatever's up may not the the cheapest but it's always difficult to find something cheaper elsewhere, even if it does exist.
However I'm not sure these adjustments are meant to make people perceive that Amazon has the lowest prices. Instead it seems like they're meant to ensure that Amazon actually has the lowest prices on the most popular and high volume items. On those items they are pricing for high volume, while on the lower volume items they need a higher price to get an equivalent margin. That's what this looks like to me: maximizing margins across products with different sales volumes.
The standard model was the one the manufacturer expected to sell. Of course, the rare price-insensitive customer would buy the deluxe, and the salesman was happy to sell that and collect the large commission.
Sure enough, he bought the camera body dirt cheap. But he walked out of the store with a lense, filter, case, flash, film, and a few other accessories. When back home, he ruefully discovered that the total price he shelled out was higher! He didn't realize that the accessories were priced higher than the competition. People simply are not price sensitive to add-ons, and salesmen have known that for centuries.
Gillette is famous for pretty much giving away the razor and making money on the blades.
There's even a word for it: "loss leader".
All Amazon has done is automate it. Pretty much all retailers do it.
Admittedly... if you're not including the blades, the "razor" is just a plastic stick.
I've wised up to this tactic and will buy extra when the price is low enough to make it a better deal than buying at the grocery store.
They posted about $10 device, and almost immediately Amazon pumped up the price to $30.
Sometimes prices are just lower elsewhere, sometimes free shipping comes without a requirement to make a $35 order. (Or pay a high annual fee for free shipping that wouldn't amortize well for me.)
And sometimes Amazon still is the cheapest, but not by so much that it feels imperative to shop there if I have reasons not to.
Amazon underbid competitors on the short tail and make it up on the long tail.
Amazon also stand the benefit that nothing is technically "upsale", since it's all horizontally in the same basket, so they can't get accused of selling you extra stuff the way other vendors might.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/10/363103753/textbook...
(best imo was talking about the whole mess around writing textbooks)
WalMart is great when the value of your own time is not very high, but at some point, it is glaringly obvious that they keep prices lower by making all their customers spend just a little bit more time in the store than absolutely necessary.
So the inconvenience is very inconvenient. It is only made worse by the fact that I didn't shop for the items, and didn't buy them, but I'm simply the one who drives past a Wal*Mart every day. For the shopper, it really is free at-home delivery. For me, it is, "Hey, guess what? You get to flush half an hour of your life down the toilet today--what a deal!"
Ship-to-Store is precisely the reason why I fear Amazon Locker and other "ship it the last mile yourself" services.
(a) Free shipping at $50.
(b) limit on quantity of item purchased (e.g. only 4 bags of flour at time)
So, you cannot purchase large quantities of a single low priced staple, you have to buy 4 of a lot of items. Or buy high priced items.
The catch is that if several big retailers apply the Amazon strategy, a self-reinforcing feedback loop will drive the prices for popular products to zero and the prices for less popular products to +inf. This will make popular products even more popular, which further strengthens the effect. The question that this startup has to answer is thus how they are going to keep the market from exploding and how they can benefit several clients at the same time.
AmazonBasics is currently the best cheap cable (replacing Monoprice's now that they aren't nearly as good as they used to be).
Also, why does the article call them HD cables. Whats an HD cable? None of my ports say HD, they say HDMI.
And it doesn't even get into how Prime games S&H over the long term.
Resellers in the Amazon site have to up their prices to account for the free shipping, but I find that the upped price is still a bit cheaper than paying for the shipping separate.
OTOH Toys R Us will definitely sell above retail. Set 60057 is $17 at Amazon, $20 from Lego, and $25 at TRU.
Stores are even being robbed of LEGO merchandise:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/story-fni0cx12-122...