Amazon raised Prime Day prices, misleading consumers, says vendor

I&#x27;ve become more and more disillusioned by Amazon over the years. Prices are now almost never the best; I only buy from them when I need something quickly (and can&#x27;t get it locally). NewEgg (nearly) always has better tech prices. Walmart often has better prices on everyday items and I can have it immediately. I just bought a pair of tweezers at my local grocery store for two bucks that was $6 on Amazon for the same make&#x2F;model; sure, it&#x27;s a terrible item to sell online because it&#x27;s tiny and cheap and shipping it with prime shipping probably costs as much as the item itself, but I thought they&#x27;d solved that problem with &quot;add on&quot; items.<p>I mean, Amazon is still a very good customer experience, but when I&#x27;m buying something big I always comparison shop now. As recently as a couple years ago, I would just buy it. No thought to whether it might be cheaper elsewhere. The convenience of Prime, plus the reasonable confidence that the price would be competitive with everybody else, was enough to where I didn&#x27;t bother comparison shopping.<p>Obviously, Amazon isn&#x27;t hurting. But, I can&#x27;t help but think that having more of their longtime customers starting to comparison shop is a bad thing.

There were real deals on Amazon hardware devices (Echo, Fire, etc). Most everything else was &quot;meh&quot;.<p>camelcamelcamel.com is your friend to research how good of a deal it really is. (no affiliation, just a happy user)

Not only is this not new for traditional vendors, it&#x27;s not even new for the internet. Scummy sellers on Steam do the same thing right before sales every single year. Oh well. At least some quite nice Anker stuff was actually on sale. You can never have enough USB chargers these days.<p>Just like in the case of Steam, I&#x27;m more apt to believe it&#x27;s sellers that are doing this than Amazon. While both stand to benefit, sellers stand to benefit much more overall.<p>Although it&#x27;s never going to be perfectly accurate, I recommend anyone who shops Amazon for expensive stuff use a price tracking service, like CamelCamelCamel, to see exactly how good a deal on Amazon really is. Again, not perfect, but at least you can then get some context for what the price is currently showing up as.

It&#x27;s clear to any layperson willing to do research that they did so - I looked up several items on a few price history websites, and found that while they did have lower than normal prices, it was more like a 4% discount off the bottom instead of the 40% they claimed. The Yeti microphones seemed to be the absolute worst - they have never ever been $150, more like $90, and they were on sale for $85 or so.

Wirecutter found an improvement over last year (0.54% of deals good value vs 0.008%).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;wirecutter&#x2F;status&#x2F;884900863218769920" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;wirecutter&#x2F;status&#x2F;884900863218769920</a><p>Will have to wait for their full write up but there genuinely were a lot of quality items for the lowest price ever.

&quot;Order within the next 5 hours and receive free next day shipping&quot;.<p>Hmm. OK. <i>click</i><p>&quot;Please review your order. $8.99 for next day shipping or free two day shipping.&quot;<p>Uh, OK. &#x27;Check two day shipping. Submit&#x27;<p>&quot;Your order has been placed. Delivery date - 5 days from now&quot;

That&#x27;s pretty standard for what I call the &quot;scam economy&quot; that is the US for the past 20 years. Watch any commercial.

My issue with Amazon lately isn&#x27;t just the prices no longer being the lowest, it&#x27;s that a big chunk of their products are counterfeits. I honestly have no idea how they haven&#x27;t tamped down on that. If I shop at Wal-Mart, Target, Footlocker, etc, etc I know the products I buy aren&#x27;t going to be fakes; no so with Amazon. I have started buying less stuff on there after a number of products have come back as fakes. I use Prime Video more than any other service now, but there&#x27;s only maybe 2 shows I even care about on there.

Er, is this not illegal in the USA? It is in Canada:<p><i>The Act prohibits false or misleading representations to the public as to the ordinary selling price of a product, in any form whatsoever. Ordinary selling price is validated in one of two ways: either a substantial volume of the product was sold at that price or higher, within a reasonable amount of time (volume test); or the product was offered for sale, in good faith, for a substantial period of time at that price or a higher price (time test).</i>[0]<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.competitionbureau.gc.ca&#x2F;eic&#x2F;site&#x2F;cb-bc.nsf&#x2F;eng&#x2F;02776.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.competitionbureau.gc.ca&#x2F;eic&#x2F;site&#x2F;cb-bc.nsf&#x2F;eng&#x2F;02...</a>

When I worked at a very large bricks&#x2F;ecommerce retailer, the FTC had their eye on us for decades, so we had very complex pricing rules to make sure that we established &quot;regular price&quot; for a certain number of days before an item could be put on sale, and could only stay on sale for a certain percentage of on-sale days, then once &quot;marked down&quot; or &quot;clearance&quot; could never have the price raised again.<p>I&#x27;m guessing the FTC will have their eye on Amazon pricing soon.

If you look at revenue and profit analysis from Amazon, it&#x27;s clear that they are still customer focused. It&#x27;s just that advertisers are now a bigger customer than the &quot;real&quot; customers. Amazon makes more money off of sponsored listings than selling the item sponsored. Kinda crazy.

Back at an old startup when I had a lot of data from clothing retail websites, including historical prices and sale status, I ran some queries out of curiosity to look for this.<p>I&#x27;m pretty cynical but I was still shocked at the number of results. This seems to be a completely normal practice. Price and being on &quot;SALE&quot; seemed to be optimized or A&#x2F;B tested almost separately. And the &quot;regular price&quot; field on sale items was garbage data that correlated with nothing.

I saw a lot of comments saying &quot;Prime Day&quot; was really &quot;Prime Marketing Day&quot;. Seems that was the case.

I use Google Shopping ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shopping.google.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shopping.google.com&#x2F;</a> ) to compare prices. We saved over $300 on a King-sized bed when we wanted to upsize our bed.

I suspect RRP&#x2F; MSRP have nearly always been useless. Comparison is the only way to get a true sense of what a regular market price is for something. Too often I will see something on a 50%+ off sale which might just be matching the market or actually 5-10% off where the rest of the market is at.<p>After all, why would a retailer ever discount more than 10-20% off what everyone else is charging, outside of a clearance?

Note that producers can&#x27;t contractually force independent retailers to obey certain prices under antitrust rules. Hence MSRPs being merely &quot;suggested&quot;.

So, just like every other store, before the sale, they jack up the prices to make the markdown look more extreme.<p>What, have people never shopped in Sears&#x2F;Macys&#x2F;Mervyns or any other department store since the beginning of time?<p>Seriously, the only response I can come up with to this news is &quot;Well... duh.&quot;

For me, Amazon used to be synonymous with quality, convenience and peace of mind. That has now changed, it is now merely convenient and subject to increasing competition. This last year I cancelled my Amazon Prime and now using Amazon far less than I used to.<p>Amazon has dropped the ball.

Not really newsworthy. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. &quot;Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.&quot; -Publilius Syrus (1st century BC)

For some reason, I can&#x27;t take this seriously coming from fox news. They seem to be having an agenda with the current president, and Amazon has been getting hit as a collateral for feuds against the Washington post.<p>Either way, the article concludes with the vendor saying he think its just an issue with tweaking their algorithms, and not an actual tactic from Amazon.<p>Is there any other source that claim the same?

Udemy does this as well for all of their products.

Amazon created a second black friday. I&#x27;m impressed by Jeff Bezos!

Off topic but I just picked up those shoe deodorizers for $10 at the container store and they have actually knocked down the stench emanating from my hiking shoes.

I bought a Brother laser printer with toner for $80 shipped in two days. Happy Amazon consumer here. You&#x27;ll have to rip Prime out of my cold dead hands.

I feel the same based on price of items I watched. I&#x27;m curious any site like camelcamelcamel can help quantify this &quot;scam&quot; :)

aka these Labor Day, Black Friday, and other annual sales by your nearest retailer. Same old.

There were good deals on shoes. I bought shoes for $36.20 (New Balance) that retail for $51.

Article is worth reading. Imo the upping of price after demand increase is awful.<p>Also, i do not think those addicted to Amazon care about these types of things. They keep ordering and ordering. Convenience is the name of their game

Keepa is a great extension for price tracking on Amazon directly embedded into the page.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keepa.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keepa.com&#x2F;</a>

Amazon bumped the price of a $20 Britta water filter by $15 when I went to purchase it a second time. Odd how that can happen.

How do you fact check Fox?

haha, this is similar to what JD do in China.

FOX is fishing for how Amazon could be hurting consumers so as to get anti trust litigation going. It is not illegal to be a monopoly but if it is hurting consumers it is fair game.<p>My opinion Amazon is NOT hurting consumers but rather Trump and the Republicans want to hurt it. YMMV

A few years ago, the word on the street was that bezos agreed to boost prices to reward the longtime shareholders&#x2F;hedge funds&#x2F;etc. And as expected, the prices on amazon have noticeably increased and the shares are at all-time highs.<p>Amazon is large enough now that they have a &quot;captive market&quot;.

Maybe I&#x27;m in the minority here but I don&#x27;t have a problem with this. If they raise the price based on demand, and I still deem it a good price, then who was harmed here? Sure I paid more than I needed to but I still paid less than I felt it was worth to me.

Go to a brick and mortar jewelry store, everything is 100% off.