My girl was looking for a dress for Halloween. Yesterday she found one on Amazon for € 35 and put it in the cart, but did not buy it. Today she looked it up again and it was € 50 so she asked me to look it up with my phone with my Amazon account - it turned out to be € 23 for me, less than half of what it’s for her!
Sure it’s the same seller?? I’m pretty sure Amazon does not show different prices to different people. But the same product is often offered by several sellers, for different prices. And if for example one of you has Prime and fast shipping activated, it’ll show the fastest option. Which might be more expensive. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening here. It’ll say somewhere: Sold by XY, ships from Amazon.com. Make sure it says the same thing there.
Of if she put it into the cart and now Amazon sticks with the exact option… If the specific seller increased their prices over night, the shopping cart might stick to the seller and it becomes more expensive for her… While Amazon will offer you a different seller that’s cheaper today. But everyone can choose which seller to buy from, if there are multiple for a product.
Price tracking systems like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel wouldn’t work if they started doing this. I can verify that, when I get alerts, the price on Amazon is the same as the alert price.
yeah and I’ve done a lot of chatting about amazon products online at reddit, forums, etc over the last 20 years or whatever and never once seen people get different prices on the same amazon link.
There are definitely different prices when I’m logged in vs when I’m not. My wife sends me a links to products, and I usually open any link in incognito windows. Several times I was not seeing the same price as her. Opening the same link on my account would show the same price.
This is the answer. I wanted to buy a pole saw and kept seeing different prices just throughout the day and later I noticed that it was from different sellers
Yeah I’ve definitely been caught off guard by the different sellers selling identical products before. Check the URL and see if the ID is the same, it probably won’t be.
Yeah there’s a few reasons why the offer that wins the buy box (the term for which merchants offer is shown to the customer prominently) and is complex, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly sinister or designed to mislead. If one person has prime and the other doesn’t, it might weight more towards a prime offer which may be more expensive, a price from a merchant may have changed, or gone out of stock.
Can OP (or anyone) provide a legitimate source for this?
From what I can find, Amazon and its partners do dynamic pricing (based on various algorithms) but I can find no evidence / source that it does personalized individualized pricing.
IOW, dynamic pricing is not done at the individual shopper level, but can be based on many variables like lightning deals, sudden spikes in demand, inventory issues (over supply / under supply) and various other factors which are not related to the individual shopper.
Anecdotal evidence is interesting, but not persuasive.
I haven’t seen any studies, I seem to remember there was some news reports many years ago.
I do know that I’ve stood in my living room, on the same wifi, and looked art the same item from Amazon on my phone and my brother in laws phone and seen different prices. But that’s just another anecdote.
Amazon doesn’t track users, but it does have various sellers selling the same items. The search results aren’t always in the same order and sometimes the price on the item page is based on whichever seller has that item.
For example, I wanted a faux leather jacket. I found dozens of them in various sizes from different sellers. Changing the size on one page changed the seller entirely.
(TLDC - Price history tracking plugin)
Amazon countered price tracking by introducing coupons that only apply at checkout. Some products only use coupons for discounting now.
Just be aware that these prices may not be the true lows.
That explains why I see coupons more and more. Ty.
I’ve never seen a coupon on amazon
It’s often a checkbox in green near the checkout button if the item and can be the most absurd percentages that shift daily and are often better discounts than sale days.
Yes, and Prime-only discounts, so they cannot easily be scraped.
I haven’t experienced that, but I used to do my amazon purchases at the end of the month until I noticed all the prices get raised around that time. So now I shop without rhythm to not attract the price inflation worm
This is an industry wide thing.
Some vendors detect if you are on a Mac, and the assumption is.you have money, and therefore the prices are higher
If they detect that you’re using a 19 year old ThinkPad with Arch linux, they aggressively increase the price on thigh-high rainbow socks.
changing my user agent to Brave so everyone thinks I lost my money to scams
Then what about 🐪🐪🐪?
Another comment pointed out that apparently amazon fighting this with coupon system
Some products have discounted prices for Prime members.
Neither of us has prime
Does no one cross ship any more for the best deal? I haven’t trusted online pricing in ages
Yep. Dynamic pricing.
Other people have reported it with travel sites when looking at flights, you get different prices on a Mac vs windows.
Vendors of any ilk would love to be able to adjust prices per customer.
I need to try with my user agent set to a Chromebook. Maybe I’ll even get a discount.
Adblock premium cost is wildly different based on location.
Using a VPN I have found everything from $15/yr to $40/yr
You’re paying for an ad blocker? uBlock origin is free and fully featured.
I pay for Mullvad VPN, that’s €60/yr ($65)
I know it’s much but I prefer mailing them a letter with the money to stay anonymous
I am using mullvad vpn as well.
I am saying that AdBlock premium has a different cost based on your location, which you can switch with your VPN.
Use uBlock origin instead. Cost is $0 forever, and it has the best adblocking by far.
You can augment that with an NextDNS account to do ad filtering at the DNS level. It is a pay service technically, but their free tier is very generous.
It is not the best adblocking by far, that is not accurate.
It is better than the free AdBlock extension, yes. It is not better than AdBlock premium. No more cookies popups, no more floating video players on news sites, no more mailing list popups. These are three things that you do not get with ublock origin. I know because I use both.
I already use adgaurds DNS, which is free.
Lastly, I’m more than happy to pay $15/yr to a company fighting a fight I believe in. Now, I wouldn’t pay $40/yr, but if all I need to do is change my VPN from New Jersey to Montreal to get more than 50% off that price, it’s a no brainier.
My only complaint is they don’t have a Firefox mobile extension, so when I’m on my phone I’m stuck with janky-ass ublock origin and nothing better.
Whatever works for you.
Personally, I have none of the above issues with Unlock origin. Its deeply tunable, so after adding a few lists past the default, it stops all the above.
I buy IVPN sub with Monero, so it’s private. I’mma try Mullvad next time.
I think it’s neat. You create an account, without an email address, you just get a random number, choose a password. Then you have the option to send them a letter containing the money and a piece of paper with your random number and they’ll add the time to your account.
Or you can use any other form of payment, including monero
that’s just regional pricing. it makes sense and is pretty standard.
Clear her browsing data and try again, this happens with flights too.
This is why fingerprinting is an issue.
Sidenote. I went to by a boxset of books for my partner and it was ~50 for the set, I got back to pay the next day and it is 100. On ye third day it is ~70 with a note that it is down from 110. Scumbaggery.
I only serf Amazon on private without being logging in, if I find something I like, then I copy the link to my regular browser.
If you’re not gonna give a lurker a good price, I’m not interested.
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They do the same as the airlines, if they see you have interest they raise the ticket price
Edit: if you use a vpn and check airline price from another IP you will see different prices for same flight. And on Amazon my printer ink for obsolete model was $8, once I starred buying it started to hit $35-40.
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I learned about supply and demand in middle school.
Right, but that would be a whole crowd’s worth of demand. Why would you raise the price of something after only one person shows interest? One person is not “demand.” And also, there probably isn’t a finite supply of the product in question like there would be for hotel rooms in one town.
