
Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) - YeGoblynQueenne
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
======
Animats
There was someone who saw his own product being resold at a higher price. So
he placed an order with the reseller while substantially raising the price of
his own product. They had to buy from him at a big loss or take a hit on their
reputation.

~~~
jshap70
I feel like this is illegal... not sure specifically for what though. maybe
racketeering?

~~~
jmaygarden
Which part do you think is illegal? Reselling at a higher price like that is
called arbitrage, and it is perfectly legal.

------
Vibrelli
I'm an Amazon Seller myself - the reason that other sellers add to the listing
with products for sale (with crazy price), is they get access to all the
metrics on the listing, traffic, conversion rate etc etc. It's a ploy to get
access to the sales data.

------
JaggedJax
The author makes the assumption that some buyers will pick the higher rated
seller. This can certainly happen, but almost everyone buys from whichever
seller Amazon puts in the buy box and so this would lead to virtually zero
sales. However the buy box does not always list the cheapest price. Amazon
uses seller rating as a large portion of the decision of who gets that buy
box. By having a better seller rating and a higher price, Amazon will
sometimes give you the buy box and you will get the sale. So in the end this
method works not because the buyer is shrewd with regards to seller ratings,
but because Amazon doesn't always suggest the lowest price. If you always want
the best price you need to click through to look at all sellers.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854).

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289742)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I found the first discussion before posting, but I figured after 7 years there
would be enough people who hadn't seen it the first time around to warrant a
new post.

Is that not OK?

I didn't notice the second conversation. If I had, I'd probably not have re-
posted it so soon.

Edit: Actually, I can't find the 2015 conversation in the search.

~~~
dang
No it's fine, I just post the links because people like to look at previous
discussions.

To be precise, it's fine once more than a year has gone by since the last
significant discussion. Otherwise we treat reposts as dupes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
But if a story hasn't had significant discussion yet, and it's particularly
good, reposts are ok. Allowing good stories to have multiple chances at
getting attention is a way to mitigate the randomness of what gets seen on the
/newest page.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
OK, thanks!

------
yomly
Enjoyed this read, reading the comments section makes me wonder how many
people have silently made money over the years arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms
such as this.

Also reminds me of local competitor retailers exploiting Amazon's policies +
algorithms to incur cost at Amazon: Amazon promises the lowest price for game
pre-orders, and retailers would deliberately drop the price for a game hours
before launch, forcing Amazon to honour the low price for all pre-orderers.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
> arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms

How would you arb this?

~~~
leereeves
If there's only two copies on offer and you believe the higher priced seller
is planning to buy from the other: Buy the book from the lower priced seller,
list it for sale at a much higher price, and order it from the higher priced
seller before they change the price.

I wouldn't risk a million dollars on that strategy, though.

~~~
kakarot
Would a good tip-off be that the higher-priced seller won't have two-day
shipping enabled?

~~~
patch_collector
Not necessarily -- if the first seller has it enabled, the second seller would
just order it to be shipped directly from the first seller to the buyer, and
never have it touch their inventory.

Fun story! A family member wanted to buy an air-fryer online. She found it on
Walmart's site, then found it for $20 more on amazon. At first she tried to
buy it from Walmart, but got frustrated with the process (setting up an
account and stuff) and so she just went and paid the extra to order it from
amazon. A few days later, she gets an air fryer in a Walmart box! At first
she's super confused, and thought she'd mistakenly bought it from Walmart, so
she went to cancel it from Amazon, and saw that that one had already arrived.
What had happened was the Amazon seller was getting orders on their page, then
immediately going to Walmart, ordering the fryer, then shipping it directly to
the recipient. Kinda genius. Basically no overhead, no stock, just acting as a
hidden walmart portal and pocketing a percentage.

~~~
EGreg
Wait, the second seller wouldn't be able to set the buyer's address for the
first seller at checkout. At least, Amazon doesn't have such features -- the
seller would have to manually add the buyer's address to their own list of
addresses and so on. There is no easy "drop shipping" between sellers like
that.

I am saying this because I wanted to do drop shipping with sellers on Amazon,
to arbitrary addresses via an api. How can it be done?

~~~
ikeboy
zinc api

------
jjeaff
I think this no longer happens. Amazon seems to have implemented an algorithm
that suspends listings whose price is too far out of range. Even by a hundred
or so dollars in some cases.

~~~
ikeboy
As a seller:

Yes, sometimes they'll suspend an offer if they think it's a mistake, they
send a pricing notification. However, it's easy to relist at that price if you
really want to, you just need to put a min and Max price in their system, and
as long as your price is in between they'll accept it. The reason for this is
if sellers make a fat finger mistake, so it makes sense they have a way to
override.

Separately, they sometimes suppress the buy box if the price is over MSRP or
more than other retailers. For a current example, see
[https://www.amazon.com/CollEGGtibles-12-Pack-Egg-Carton-
Seas...](https://www.amazon.com/CollEGGtibles-12-Pack-Egg-Carton-
Season/dp/B06X9P3Y8V/)

You can still buy, it just shows up as other sellers and needs an extra step
to purchase. And it definitely hurts conversions, as I have seen on products I
sell.

~~~
exikyut
I'm curious how you found this example. I don't expect Amazon make it easy to
query/list this sort of thing.

~~~
ikeboy
I knew hatchimals were a popular toy that sometimes had more demand than
supply, so I searched for it and went through the results till I found one
that was suppressed.

I actually have a database with tens of millions of asins that I have used in
the past to generate lists of such items, but I just needed one example so
didn't bother using it for this.

------
k_f
For anyone wondering where that weird 1.27059 factor comes from: Amazon takes
15% commission (+ a fixed commission fee) for book sales. 1.27059 * 0.85 =
1.08(00015), so (practically) exactly 8% price difference (or possible profit
margin).

------
nathanvanfleet
I've noticed this on Amazon. I searched for a fiber supplement which I buy at
Walgreens for 22$. One day I saw it for sale on Amazon for 15$! So I put it in
a wishlist and waited. When it came time to buy it the price had changed to
30$, which was of course more expensive that going down the street. It was
really strange. I have kept it in my wishlist and the price has gone between
$20-$30 and the price seems different every time I look, sometimes up,
sometimes down. It's kind of mind boggling but I think I'll stick with my
local Walgreens.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There are probably all sorts of arbitrage scams that make things look weird.
For example I could imagine you could get in to baskets and lists by having a
low price whilst not having product available to ship; then increase the
price: sufficient buyers don't want to search again so you sell at the higher
price fulfilling the order by purchasing from the lower priced seller ..?
Amazon probably can't pick up all such systems, possibly they don't even try
for low grossing sellers??

~~~
thaumasiotes
Who says it's a scam? Most things fluctuate in price.

Amazon themselves sold me this sapphire ring (
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OJ2BS10/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OJ2BS10/)
) for $6. As I type this, they're charging $35 for it. It's the same product
and the same vendor; the price varies intentionally.

------
gizmo686
I just noticed something simmilar to this [0], with three sellers offering a
book for $1,499.95 (new), $1,634.06 (used), $3,361.91 (used) (plus shipping,
of course).

The book itself has other listings, such as [1] for as low as $14.76 used, or
[2] for $37.28 new [0] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/B015X4RCD0/ref=sr_1_...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/B015X4RCD0/ref=sr_1_3_olp?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517096469&sr=1-3&keywords=English+Words%3A+A+Linguistic+Introduction+by+Heidi+Harley)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Linguistic-
Introduction...](https://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Linguistic-
Introduction-2006-05-12/dp/B01NH09YOM/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517096469&sr=1-2&keywords=English+Words%3A+A+Linguistic+Introduction+by+Heidi+Harley)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Introduction-Heidi-
Harl...](https://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Introduction-Heidi-
Harley/dp/0631230327/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517096469&sr=1-1&keywords=English+Words%3A+A+Linguistic+Introduction+by+Heidi+Harley)

------
dantillberg
This makes me wonder if it might be possible, for certain commodities, to buy
out the entire market (across all retail websites) and immediately offer the
items for resale at a higher price in order to expose naked offers. Though
unlike doing the same on commodities exchanges, it would probably never be a
profitable enterprise, as these naked sellers will simply cancel orders they
can't fill.

~~~
ikeboy
I've bought Amazon out on some items when they have a sale and then sold later
for a profit.

The best items to do this on is discontinued items that will still be in
demand, as you can sure that eventually there will be no stock. Or when they
have a significant sale on items that still sell reasonably well at regular
price. The significant shipping fees for reselling mean you need to have a
large discount. You also have costs of returns, storage, etc. You typically
want a minimum of 15-20% gross ROI after those fees.

For example, I've bought shavers at $180 and resold at $290-$300, from Amazon
and on Amazon.

~~~
amelius
I appreciate the frankness, but this is a lot like the usurious trade of
concert tickets: not a very noble thing to do, to make an understatement.

~~~
nothrabannosir
If concert halls / theatres actually cared about scalping they’d require ID on
admission. But they don’t, so they don’t. They care about concerts selling
out, and they want to outsource the risk management of optimising the price to
the market. It’s like a futures market they can hedge in. All the crocodile
tears in the world won’t change that.

I will maybe, _maybe_ accept that ID’ing is a barrier in the states, but in
Europe everybody and their dog has id. Yet: scalping persists.

I don’t blame the resellers anymore, frankly.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I think amelius is more concerned about the prices concert-goers have to pay
for tickets, rather than about venues' profits.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Yes, that’s my point. Event organisers cry incessantly about scalpers and all
their purported anti-scalping rules. “Oh no, scalpers! They make it so
expensive for the fans to get our reasonably priced, accessible tickets! Which
we totally priced that way because we want you to have cheap access—not
because we want to exchange potential profits for the guarantee of selling
out!” /s.

Print a name on the ticket, check ID at entry. Zero scalpers, “problem”
solved. They know that. Yet here we are. Why oh why?

Edit: to clarify, I’m trying to say that an event organiser has value from the
concept of “selling out” beyond simply ticket revenue. It looks good, it’s a
label that evokes exclusivity and popularity in audiences , which is important
for future events. Big festivals are in the news every year with a new “sell
out record time! Five femtoseconds omg! We are electrolytes, you are plants!
Crave us!” Conveniently glossing over the fact that scalpers now own half the
tickets. When pressed, “oh no, we hate scalpers! Boo. If we catch you, ho boy!
We’ll give you a heck of a diddly talking to! Bad scalpers.” — “will you do
anything to stop them?” — “yes, we all spend five minutes each day farting in
their general direction.”

Give me a break.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I get what you're saying- but that's not absolving the scalpers, it's just
apportioning some of the blame for the exploitation of concert-goers to
concert organisers and venues.

It's like having a mafia and a corrupt police force, both. It's not like
because the cops are corrupt, the mafia gets away scott free. They're both to
blame that things are going down the drain.

In fact they're the same kind of people, following the same kind of tactics,
just from different positions in society, like.

------
0x0
So if the one seller counts on being able to buy the other seller's book if
the first seller actually makes a sale, what happens if someone buys both
listings at the same time and the higher priced listing is unable to source
the item? Can the seller just cancel the sale for no fee? Why wouldn't
everyone with a little time on their hands make 1.2x-priced listings for every
single item available for sale on amazon and dropship from the cheaper
listings?

------
JasonFruit
I wrote a hymnal[1], and currently Amazon has a copy for sale at double the
price of a new copy from my website. That put me in the unusual position of
leaving a three-star review of my own book. I sell the book as nearly at
cost+shipping as possible, as I don't want to profit off a religious book —
but that doesn't mean I want someone else to profit off it, either.

[1]: [http://olpbhtb.com](http://olpbhtb.com)

~~~
duiker101
could you sell it on amazon yourself for the same price you have it on your
website? That would discourage anyone to sell it for a profit

~~~
JasonFruit
Honestly, it's not worth the time for me to do that; it mostly sells by word
of mouth. I'd rather say, "I wouldn't recommend buying it this way," and let
people carry on doing as they wish. I'm not that worked up about controlling
others' behavior.

~~~
hakanensari
You have no ISBN, right? It's fascinating that this bookseller took the time
to create by hand an entry for your book in Amazon's product database.

In a way, not even not having an ISBN is a sure way to "withdraw from the
international book trade"[1].

[1]: [http://www.anagrambooks.com/no-isbn](http://www.anagrambooks.com/no-
isbn)

~~~
JasonFruit
Yes, that was part of the reason I didn't bother with it. I was frankly
surprised to see that anyone bothered to list a copy at all, since the market
is very small. (Primitive Baptists of any sort are a tiny, tiny fraction of a
percent of American Christianity, and the appeal of my book, if any, is to an
even smaller subset. But _de gustibus non est disputandum_.)

[EDIT: close paren. I couldn't take it!]

------
snowpanda
Looks like its on sale :P [https://smile.amazon.com/Making-Fly-Genetics-
Animal-Design/d...](https://smile.amazon.com/Making-Fly-Genetics-Animal-
Design/dp/0632030488/)

------
hawktheslayer
I like how they were still charging $3.99 for shipping. Maybe Amazon can
implement Excel's useful circular reference warning (/s)

------
DrScump
To be fair, the Kindle version is only $4.3M.

------
joering2
> But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and
> most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93
> (plus $3.99 shipping).

I was wondering if pricing on Amazon would be sufficient evidence to get into
a Guinness World Records for the most expensive book offered in public??

~~~
Johnny555
If there is such a category, then I think they'd have to actually sell it at
that price, otherwise an author could just put his book up on eBay with a
billion dollar starting price.

