When I started working on https://trackif.com, I thought the premise was thin because prices couldn't fluctuate that much. I assumed everything gradually declined in price, and that it'd primarily be driven by store-A vs store-B price dropping.
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?
I can speak to 25 years ago: the answer is yes. Here are some of the things I saw:
* 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.
In the furniture biz, lots of places have laws restricting how many days/year a given shop can do "going out of business"/"total clearance" sales. Otherwise, they tend to run them non-stop for decades because they are so effective at bringing in customers.
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?
In Europe, there are rules about sale pricing for all items, they have to be at the original price for a certain period. They still manage to game it a bit, but slightly less so, eg some items are normally overpriced etc.
What I have noticed recently in UK TV adverts is that £xxx off special offer and then put an on-screen rider "discount on 'after offer' price".
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.
Also offers have to be changed every 3 months in the UK, otherwise it is no longer considered an offer/bonus but the standard price and has to be advertised as such.
There is a furniture store near where I live that was going out of business for 10 years. My wife and I always joked that they should have a "Proudly going out of business for 10 years" sign.
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?
Some street vendors in downtown Washington, DC, used to have a sign over their table "Going Out For Business Sale". Whether they were hoping to lure the inattentive, amuse the alert, or both, I don't know.
Thirty years ago the atterney general for Maryland, Steve Sachs, hassled a couple of the big local department stores into agreements restricting this sort of behavior.
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.
I have the same question as DiabloD3, and I presume others do as well. Your desire not to hijack is honorable, but private email doesn't scale that well. I fear I'd be wasting your time to engage you directly. Perhaps you could write a short blog post and post it to HN for discussion? Or a Show HN? Or you could just answer here, toning done the marketing as much as possible.
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??
* 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 don't, yet, trust you. What are you doing to provide some confidence that my name & amazon wish list won't be sold...
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.
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.
(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.)
If anyone is curious about whether's it's worth checking CamelCamelCamel before making an Amazon purchase, look at the price history for this tea in the past year:
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.
It has nothing to do with market fluctuations. I've been using CamelCamelCamel for years now, and you can see wild fluctuations on an hourly basis, sometimes by more than 50%.
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.
You're suggesting that the worldwide price of tea or market conditions are causing these nearly monthly fluctuations, between two set prices? I'm skeptical, the graph doesn't suggest that to my untrained eye.
I buy from amazon for their low prices - sure, they aren't always the lowest, but they're the lowest often enough that I can safely shop at amazon without shopping around. I don't want to price check five different stores before I buy something, the convenience of knowing that amazon almost always is selling something for reasonably close to the lowest price is valuable to me.
A part of me would pay a certain premium to keep records of all the things I've purchased online in as many different places as possible, rather than providing one company with a fairly good profile of what my interests are.
Same here, of course amazon doesn't always have the lowest price, but I'd be insane to always buy from (and register at) the store that currently does. For me there's much more value in knowing that the item will arrive tomorrow.
And the money you save by buying from randomstore247.com is offset by how much you stand to lose (in either money or time) when randomstore247.com has a breech and your card number had been stored in the clear. It's easier to trust Amazon than to trust 100 other stores.
That's not my main worry. I had my credit card compromised in the Home Depot thing. The bank sent me a new card and auto-canceled my old one. Someone used the number, but they automatically reverted the charge. It cost me approximately zero seconds of time (but seems to have cost the bank quite a bit of money). Credit card fraud is the bank's problem, not the consumer's problem, at least in the US. (God help you if you use a debit card, though.)
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.
Agreed. Maybe if this article was written 5 years ago I can understand, but unless you're live somewhere where you don't have access to Amazon; everyone knows it's not just the prices that Amazon has that keeps customers coming back. People trust it. Amazon has the best customer service I've ever experienced. It is amazing. imo it's because unlike most stores, Amazon keeps your full shopping history so they know your worth to the company (as well as your habits and so on).
As a counterpoint: Most people I know go to Amazon 100% for the prices. Often they will actually visit a brick-and-mortar store first to browse in person (page through a book at a bookstore, even try on shoes at a shoe store), and only then order on Amazon, once they've decided what they want. Amazon adds nothing here in convenience or service. The most convenient option would be to just buy the item you already physically have in your hands, which means you'd get it today, and not have to deal with UPS missed-delivery bullshit. But Amazon gets the sale because they win on price. Or at least used to!
counter-counterpoint: I bet a large portion of the people you're talking about are genuinely price conscious consumers trying to make the most educated purchases they possibly can. I doubt these people would be the same type that blindly buy an hdmi cable at a 20% markup... how simple is it to compare prices these days online? If you're traveling to a book store then buying through amazon I would bet money that you're probably going to price check that Amazon branded hdmi cable.
5 years ago amazon launched an explicit software-backed system to stop "leaving money on the table", by raising prices in non-competitive products. Sire it's what HFTs do all the time, but it was a bream from amazon's tradition of being the lowest price for everything and making money in volume (or deferring profitability)
I used to feel that way about Costco, until they changed their "Customer satisfaction warranty"! Change return policy
on electronics--fine I get it. Change the return policy on a
$2500 grey market watch--underhanded. I was promised verbally if it ever broke, because it's not sold by "an authorized seller"; just bring it back. No so anymore.
They mention HDMI cables specifically. I just went into a Best Buy and asked for their cheapest HDMI cable. The salesman showed me one for $15. The Amazon basics cable is $5.49. If you've got Prime and you factor in the shipping costs of using another website, it's hard to beat Amazon's price.
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!
The main reason I buy cables from Amazon instead of Monoprice is Prime. Monoprice's shipping is always slow for me. (Last gig I was at, we bought a truckload of their monitors, though, on my recommendation. Love those guys, just wish they could ship faster without ruining my wallet.)
HDMI cables are IMHO the worst example. These are add-on to core purchases and when they break or are required you just want to get one. Physical stores like BestBuy know this and price accordingly. This just makes me dislike these stores even more!
I am willing to pay a significant premium to Amazin for the no-bullshit customer support. If my transaction doesn't delight me, I know they will make good on it.
I have a similar mindset. I don't know anyone who thinks Amazon has the best prices, I'm happy to pay a little extra for the convenience and quality of service.
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).
I've never had any trouble returning anything to Amazon in the US.
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.
Apart from the refund before the item was returned, this is pretty much standard procedure in europe, as in a consumer right by law - you always have 14 day return period at any online store. Sure, amazon extends their grace period (30 days, right?) - other than that it's really nothing special.
Nothing special from a legal standpoint, but it's all about how easy they make it. I have bought from other online retailers, and whilst the experiences haven't been bad, they still aren't quite as slick compared to Amazon. I can't really point to anything in particular that will convince you, it's just that the whole process is painless and easy, not just for the basics (purchasing) but for everything.
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.
It's fine, I didn't try to nitpick. No need to convince me - I like their service too. Though you'd be surprised how many people don't know that the return option is available everywhere.
Similar experience, with a full refund before the item was returned.
I don't know about the US but you don't get anywhere near this kind of service with any other UK retailer.
Have you tried similar returns with other products? Your description just sounds (to me) like Amazon are compliant with English distance selling law, and not that they were particularly good.
Yes, I've tried other online retailers in the past (including returns IIRC), and I'm sure I will in the future too.
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.
It's not only amazon that does this with loss leader pricing, it its also my local grocery store with milk and bread.
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.
I'm sure Amazon is constantly adjusting their prices in order to maximize their sales and revenue; they even have some price automation tools as part of their inventory management system for people who sell their stuff through Amazon.
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.
Another common sales technique is to have 3 models in a line - the stripper, the standard, and the deluxe. The stripper was barely functional, and its sole purpose was to have a cheap price to attract customers to the showroom. The deluxe had every silly feature the manufacturer could think of, like pinstriping on a dishwasher. It had a very high price. It's sole purpose was to 'frame' the price of the standard model and make it look like a bargain.
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.
Pricing the most-seen items lower is not quite as nefarious as "trick" would suggest, IMHO - and part of it is probably just driven by various advantages of selling a lot of some particular product.
This is all old, old news. Back in the 1970's, a friend of mine was shopping for a nice SLR camera. He knew which camera he wanted, and diligently researched ad after ad, finally settling on one with the cheapest price. We all piled into his car to go get it.
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.
Amazon jacks the price around on a lot of the household items that I buy. There one item that I last purchased for $11.94. I have seen it as high as $29 and some change. Right now it is $23.94.
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.
Surprisingly most home improvement things are cheaper at Home Depot rather than Amazon. I learned this one the hard way. Also Amazon routinely displays "original" prices that are much higher than other places and with the "discount" falls in the same price range.
When I decided I didn't feel great about supporting Amazon any longer due to its reported treatment of its business partners, corporate employees, and warehouse employees, I started shopping around and was surprised to find it wasn't so hard to find deals just as good or better elsewhere.
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.
As has been said, this should be no surprise at all - especially if you've followed phenomenons like the Harry Potter books that got the same treatment.
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.
I read on NPR a while ago some guys found an arbitrage opportunity in book prices. So - he would track the most sought after books, buy them when price were low, usually around July/August, and then sell them back on Amazon when prices were high, around the time of September and January. Makes sense.
I think WalMart is pretty focused on free ship-to-store. This doesn't appeal to me at all since I live in a big city and going to a suburban Walmart would be a big production. It makes a certain amount of sense for my parents since there's a Walmart neighborhood market five minutes from their house. It eliminates one risk of online purchases (package sitting on your doorstep) but introduces the inconvenience of parking and getting your product from the store's customer service department.
Every time that I have used Ship-to-Store from WalMart, I have had to spend at minimum 30 minutes between entering and exiting the store parking lot. Most of the time, I have to hunt down a store employee myself, because unlike the customer service desk, the Ship-to-Store/Layaway desk is not continuously staffed.
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.
> The startup wants to help Amazon competitors think about pricing in as sophisticated a way as Amazon does.
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.
Is it possible that there are different types of cables that offers HD transfer to the TV? I've never really heard "HD" cable either, but in the article I read it as HDMI, had to go back to check if it actually said HD.
You can do 1080i over YCbCr analog, but no one has done this for like a decade, and it only made sense for pre-HDMI HD sets (which made as little sense to manufacture as pre-Rec2020 4k TVs being made now).
If you are a Prime user then logout of Amazon and go look for that same item again. If the item is sold/shipped by Amazon then you might not find a big difference, but if the item is sold/shipped by a different company then you will see that the price is lower, but you have to pay shipping.
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.
Amazon doesn't sell every product themselves. Most are Amazon Marketplace sales, which are entirely 3rd party (some are Fulfilled by Amazon, which gives you the Prime shipping but is still 3rd party). In these cases, Amazon can't control the prices at all; it's all up to the 3rd parties to set the prices.
Disagree. I've never seen Amazon itself sell LEGO above retail price. They just tend to run out of stock, so they don't actually sell many sets. Third party sellers often do up charge, but that's basicaly like buying on eBay.
OTOH Toys R Us will definitely sell above retail. Set 60057 is $17 at Amazon, $20 from Lego, and $25 at TRU.
LEGO pricing in general has been inflated recently. Flippers and 3rd-party Amazon sellers know this, so they buy up all the stock to resell via Amazon FBA. It's a LEGO bubble right now with a lot of artificial demand. Some of these flippers will coordinate massive regional buyouts of a given LEGO set from retail stores by using people from Fiverr, etc. and then hoard the bulk lots or sell to collectors.
I also like the simple but effective Keepa http://keepa.com to compare amazon prices in different countries at the same time.
In Europe for example, Hometheater amps are 50% cheaper in Germany than france, while france is cheaper on something else and UK is cheaper on tools and sometimes projectors (depending of FX rates)
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?