
Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback - TimTheTinker
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/technology/amazon-used-paperback-book-pricing.html
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beauzero
It is more than likely the repricer. Amazon will remove prices eventually. The
reason nobody catches these is that they are slow moving books. We used to
only clean them up once a week sometimes as much as once a month. It happens
with all the repricing software. Some are better than others and you can
always add caps. I think our cap was $4000. You have to set the cap that high
because there are certain architectural, medical, and occasionally historical
texts or sets that will run this high. ...and books are a volume game. The
more you process the more you sell.

Software generally used... Monsoon Fillz SellerCentral NeatoScan Thrift books
(close to the largest is primarily in house software).

When I worked there we ran close to 120k skus (sku = ean, condition combo). We
were not the largest but, for a time in the top 10% of third party new and
used book sellers. We got our books from remainders, closeouts, and auction.
Most of the time we could process ~15-25 pallets/gaylords of books per week.

It's a repricing issue that no one has caught yet because it's a crappy title
and no one is worried about losing a sale. Titles with a rank of < 10k are
monitored daily for mispricing issues. Other than that...scan more books, get
them listed, it's all about the numbers.

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pwned1
Isn't this a known method of money laundering?

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thenewwazoo
This article was ridiculously, preposterously, embarrassingly credulous. I
cannot believe anyone could possibly be so naive but here we are.

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cantrevealname
I've seen this phenomenon discussed before on Hacker News and Reddit, and it's
disappointing that the New York Times did a shallow article and didn't really
get to the bottom of it. The explanations I've heard include:

(1) Bots running against each other bidding up the price on obscure titles.
One strategy might be to price a book that you _don 't_ have in stock at 10%
greater than the other seller who presumably does have it. Then if you get an
order, you buy the other seller's copy and ship it to your customer getting a
10% profit. But things run amuck if multiple bots follow the same strategy.

(2) Exploiting people's stupidity and laziness. Almost nobody is going to buy
your book for $2464, but if eventually somebody somewhere clicks on the
purchase button--because they were too lazy to keep searching or thought it
was the going price--well then you've earned the profit of selling 600
legitimate books (at, say, $4 profit each) by doing 1/600 of the work! This
could indeed be your business model.

(3) Money laundering. Ie., book buyer A with lots of ill-gotten cash buys a
worthless book from seller B for a huge price. Seller B makes an enormous
profit, pays his taxes, and appears to be a clean, highly successful rare book
dealer. Buyer A and seller B are obviously part of the same organization,
maybe the even the same person.

(4) Automatic repricing software. If you're a large seller, you don't manually
choose the price of each item, but leave it to an automatic system. You'd
think that slow moving items would be priced _cheaper_ to get rid of them. But
perhaps the software keeps raising the price because it thinks it is a rare
item, or due to errors in the algorithm.

It's funny how everyone who speculates about this is convinced of their own
explanation. I'm not so sure. It might be all of the reasons above in
different proportions. I'd love it if someone who was actually doing this
outrageous pricing would speak out and tell us first hand.

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baud147258
I think for 1, we had a story on HN a few years ago, for a academic book. It
was linked elsewhere in the thread:
[http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)

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Jach
I occasionally look to see if there are any hardcover copies of _The Art of
the Metaobject Protocol_ up for sale, one appeared and is still listed at a
little over $11k. I even messaged the seller at one point around 11:30pm about
it (I'd buy it if it were a couple orders of magnitude cheaper...) and
somewhat surprisingly they got back to me within the hour to inform me that
"there is a listing error while pricing the book. However, we already informed
our listing team to rectify the mistake as soon as possible." Given the other
comment here on how teams clean them up ~once a month, I guess we'll see in
August if it's still there and at that price or not...

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IronWolve
The old world of warcraft auction house method, post something extremely high
and hope someone mistakenly buys it.

Profit.

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gwern
I ran into what apparently is the same scam, but for shipping:
[https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1009609380877225984](https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1009609380877225984)
You offer a reasonable price for the item and then charge $1k for shipping or
something like that, and apparently Amazon will enforce it.

~~~
nathancahill
Common scam on Instagram too. Run a "contest" that anyone who likes a photo
immediately "wins". They choose 6 out of 20 products as a prize, with listed
values from $10-60, but actually mass produced in China for <$3. All good
until you enter your shipping information, and shipping is $30.

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currymj
i've read about this phenomenon before. speculation was that many/most prices
are set automatically, and that these absurd prices were somehow attempts to
manipulate other prices.

money laundering also seems like a good explanation.

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jerf
Probably thinking of:
[http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)

Laundering may explain some odd prices on Amazon. But in that article, the
author witnessed the two bots one-upping each other on a certain schedule. I
don't think that was laundering.

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logfromblammo
At that price, better to buy a stamp and write the author directly, including
a check big enough to cover hardcover list price, plus postage. They might
have an extra copy in a box in storage somewhere, and they might even sign it
for you.

I'd be afraid that if I ordered the conspicuously expensive one, it would show
up hollowed out and filled with dirty fentanyl-heroin, or the book is utterly
normal, and the seller is a money launderer that now has my home shipping
address.

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LeifCarrotson
The book is utterly normal, and the seller is grateful to have your clean,
unlaundered money instead of having to pay their own seller's account with
their dirty money (and let Amazon take their cut). They'll just buy another
copy of the book with the dirty money.

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vhogemann
My experience as a developer tells me that this was somebody trying to test
something in production, while forgetting to de-list the book sku first.

