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Stupid Amazon Tricks
Mar. 29th, 2023 06:19 pmAs a friend of mine warned on the GT list recently, watch out for what Amazon does when adding items to your cart. He thought the problem was that he wasn't logged into Amazon and that they changed the price on him when he logged into his Amazon Prime account. It turns out that's not a necessary factor.
I was shopping for a new baseball scorebook today (late, since Opening Day is tomorrow), found something suitable for $10.18 that was sold and shipped *by* Amazon, and added it to my cart. The price for the item in my cart was $13.90 before tax. After repeating this dance several times and refreshing the original page to see the $10.18 price, I got on chat with an Amazon representative.
I have now successfully purchased the scorebook at the correct price with a $5 voucher for my trouble, but this is really disturbing. The chat rep tried explaining to me about "dynamic pricing", but that doesn't apply when the price on the original page isn't changing. What it actually is would be a bad car dealer level of price manipulation.
Ah, well.
Baseball tomorrow!
I was shopping for a new baseball scorebook today (late, since Opening Day is tomorrow), found something suitable for $10.18 that was sold and shipped *by* Amazon, and added it to my cart. The price for the item in my cart was $13.90 before tax. After repeating this dance several times and refreshing the original page to see the $10.18 price, I got on chat with an Amazon representative.
I have now successfully purchased the scorebook at the correct price with a $5 voucher for my trouble, but this is really disturbing. The chat rep tried explaining to me about "dynamic pricing", but that doesn't apply when the price on the original page isn't changing. What it actually is would be a bad car dealer level of price manipulation.
Ah, well.
Baseball tomorrow!