How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

In my experience: Amazon automatically discounts some books, a certain time after their release. I've published several through their subsidiary CreateSpace, and the two that sold more than negligible amounts were discount the same ~28%. One eventually went back to my 'retail' and the other stayed discounted.<p>Again in my experience, Amazon's discounts do <i>not</i> effect the author's take. At least in CreateSpace, the author's royalty is based on the retail price the author sets.

There are really Markov chain generated books on Amazon? I guess it is becoming a trash dumpster after all.

Similar story from last year: "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies" <a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358" rel="nofollow">http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854</a>

I'm not sure how Amazon works; if they discount your book, and I buy it at the sale price, did you just get shafted out of some money? Or do they make up the difference?

Doesn't Amazon ban you for selling non-existent books? Because otherwise it has occurred to me that next time I look into buying a book, I could pretend to sell it for a really low price and wait for a bot to underbid me, so that I can buy it off the bot for very little money.

"trust the tattooed hipster who wrote Amazon's pricing algorithm"<p>Am I missing some context here? Amazon is full of tattooed hipsters?

This live amazon page here shows that the price for a book has been increased artificially to $7.5 million due to bots ...<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0956205100?ie=UTF8&#38;linkCode=shr&#38;camp=213733&#38;creative=393193&#38;ref_=dp_olp_used&#38;sr=1-10&#38;condition=used" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0956205100?ie=UTF8&#3...</a><p>(I got this via a tweet a few hours ago, and it seems like its still broken...)

Is it possible to do the following:<p>Invent a fake book<p>Post it for a high price<p>Watch Bots price it up<p>Buy one from a bot<p>Sell the only real one far above the bot price<p>Profit? (because the bot owner must then buy the book to ship it to the person who already bought it?)

If it has free shiping, why not buy 1.000 books for $10 and move them back to your inventory?