Another one for my pile of stories about pricing games.
I read this posting about Amazon’s price drop policy and squirrel’d it away in del.icio.us for the next time I bought something pricy at Amazon.
My wife bought a camera a bit back and so from time to time I’ve been checking to see if the price had dropped at Amazon and yesterday I noticed that it had. So I dug out the posting, logged in as my wife and followed the directions. The directions suggest that you look at your old orders and click thru from them to the item’s you think might now have lower prices; so I did that.
What a surprise. The price my shown when logged in as my wife is the price she paid. The price shown logged in as me is the a lower price. Actually, having played these pricing games for so long I’m not surprised; but still. It didn’t matter how I navigated to the item after my first visit – it sill showed the price she paid.
We asked for the price adjustment anyway and Amazon quickly granted it; so I guess that’s a good thing.
Could you possibly -make- money by shopping this way? Imagine if two cameras are $150 each, but the Buy Both and Save, or some other coupon, puts you down to $100 for both. Now, if the price drops to $80 per, they would refund you $140. They’d end up paying you $40 to buy two cameras from them. I realize the drop of $70 per pot is probably unrealistic, but it’s an idea.
Thanks for the link Ben. The price listed on the invoice will always be the price you paid, you have to click on the item link itself to see the current selling price. Glad to hear you were able to save some money.
Caleb: Yes you could but they probably have price checking algorithms in place to combat that.
Hi Jim! – Sounds like your not seeing the behavior I observed. No matter how I navigated to the item, for example stripping out the session ID and leaving only the Amazon product ID in the URL, I’d only see the price my wife originally paid. As soon as I logged out as her the price dropped.
Caleb – Yea making small sums of money playing the shopping games is actually common; but it tends to be difficult to make enough money that it could pay for your time. I wouldn’t recomend it as a way to make a living; at least not online.