In Europe there’s a law that forces stores (online but also physical) to post also the lowest minimum price in the last month.
So it would be
€199€64 (lowest price in the last 30 days: €39)Amazon US doesn’t do that, but they do show a “lowest price in 30 days” badge that is actually truthful (appears when the item is on sale and the sale price is the lowest in the last 30 days). Of course, there’s some sellers that game it by increasing their prices over 30 days before Prime Day.
I dont think it includes procong due to coupons though.
If a product had a minor coupon (e.g <5$) and the product was discounted to that price without coupon, it would still advertise lowest price despite it not really changing.
I don’t know if it’s a law here too in Canada, but Amazon.ca works the same. What sellers do to get around this just make a new listing for products at inflated rates so they can then discount them for “sales”, while simultaneously setting the regular listing to unavailable until the “sale” is over.
Using a browser addon that tracks price history, we found a bunch of “deals” on Amazon US that had raised the price 30 days ago and are now flagged “Lowest price in 30 days!”. The “deal” price was almost always the exact same price it was 31 days prior.
Do you know a good extension for iOS?
The browser add-on is called honey, and it seems to be available for other OS. Can Google it and see if they have anything that will work in your environment.
In the U.S. that’s a big “fuck you buddy, Ima get mine,” from congress.
On Germany’s site it was rampant with crap like that that had it’s price raised literally 3 days before the prime day
I’m in Europe and have never seen this in my life, what I have seen is advice price which is another scam in itself.
Here you have an example:
It’s the omnibus directive from 2019, maybe your country didn’t ratify it yet. For example my country is slow & lazy and ratified it only a few months ago
There is a law for that? never seen that. where can you see this information on amazon for example?
Amusingly enough, I bought an small appliance yesterday, amazon had worse deals than a big box store. They had cheaper prices on no name junk that was gonna take a week to get to me. Prime day is total shit.
IME Amazon has worse prices on a lot of stuff lately. It’s mostly just convenience at this point.
Exactly, amazon is a thing because we all don’t have time to run to the store for that one thing that isn’t an emergency. I see it as another way that the " " system " " has boxed us more into the “CONSUME” driven American existence. Like, even if a store is 5 minutes away and you’re getting “one thing” it’s still going to take at least 30 minute commitment especially if that store is say “walmart”. If the store is 15 mins away, you’re basically at an hour commitment.
We don’t have time to do stuff like that anymore! I am trying to weigh that thought and the idea we are all just brainwashed into the immediacy of needing everything now.
I don’t know it’s a lot to think about… lol
For me, it’s not even time that pisses me off the most.
The in-store retail experience has gone to complete and utter garbage. You take the time to get to the store, then wander around dirty aisles that are picked-over, only to find that the thing you needed or wanted isn’t even in stock (even though the website says it is). Having worked retail, I know there’s usually not “one in the back,” so even if I could find an employee (doubtful) it’s not worth the pain in the ass to do it. If you’re lucky there’s something good enough for purpose, so you take that to the front, where there’s one overworked cashier for the entire store and 3 more employees standing around talking next to the self checkouts, which don’t work.
If I order the same thing on Amazon, sure, I might have to spend a couple dollars more. What I don’t have to do is deal with all the hassle that comes with brick-and-mortar retail. Plus, if something’s not right Amazon makes returns and exchanges pretty damn easy.
I look for stores that have pickup available for some things, them all I have to do is drive there and get it. No needing to look or wait. If it isn’t in stock, the order gets cancelled and I don’t have to look for it.
If you’re into amazon electronics, that’s the only time to buy because it’s the only thing on sale. lol.
Not to defend Amazon, but in past years the comments in Reddit on this issue pointed out that Amazon has requirements on markdown percentages to qualify for prime day and lightning sales. As a result, vendors who control their price will artificially increase their price over the days leading to prime day and then apply the “discount”.
I do wish that if that were the case that Amazon actually address it as they should be able to detect that pattern. I unfortunately think they don’t care as they make money regardless. I just wish they care a bit more about earning and keeping trust.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8BPPQW
Here’s the product page. You can see how it’s 46% off $119, but if you want, you can also buy it at $89 regular price. They’re now not even increasing the price of the item, they’re just claiming it’s higher.
The normal price is $89.99, which represents a 15% discount off the MSRP of $119.99 (that they’re claiming). The current price of $64.99, is a discount of 42%, which represents an additional 27% off. I don’t think this listing necessarily proves the point.
That being said, companies absolutely do engage in this kind of bullshit. This one may have done it itself in order to claim the MSRP at $119.99.
Amazon could use the average price over the last 3 months l, but they don’t care.
Exactly. They have all the data in the world, but I’m sure they are doing what’s optimal for their profit.
Prime Day a scam? What? Impossible!
INCONCEIVABLE!
Prime Day is just Black Friday in July. Amazon is trying to get rid of old stock.
If you have an idea of what you want before the sale starts and know how much the standard price is you can still be lucky and get a good deal. You just have to be careful not to get sucked in to a non deal.
For example, I was looking out for an Apple Watch. There is a good sale on them but they only have a limited set of body and strap combinations. I don’t want any of the straps on offer so it negates almost all of the discount as I’d be paying £50 for a strap that I wouldn’t use.
This entire comment is the perfect explanation for my issue with people getting excited over Black Friday/Prime Day. I see so many people every year excitedly saying (or at times bragging), oh I got this, I got that, and it was so cheap. But unless you were already looking at that thing you haven’t saved money. You’ve actually spent more than you would have if it wasn’t on sale.
Aren’t there some website that track this?
camelcamelcamel.com is the big one, I believe.
I use the Keepa browser extension
I have no idea where the name came from, but there’s CamelCamelCamel.
The creator did an AMA on [redacted] and said that the site was initially just a side project, so the name didn’t matter. However, it started to get some traction. Then people knew it by that name, so it felt too late to change it. Now it’s way too late, so that’s the name
I’m the only one who was very underwhelmed by this year’s Prime Day(s)?
I know it’s for clearing out their warehouses, but most of the sales were on crap or only minor discounts.
I guess you meant underwhelmed instead of understanding.
And well Idk I didn’t need anything so not sure. Personally the only thing I got was the Microsoft 365 Family subscription for 1 year since it was half a price than the usual renewall… Although now that I think about it maybe I should have bought more years.
Every deal I was interested in I checked on camel camel camel. Everything was marked ~40% off but was really only like ~5-10% off. There were a few good deals, but they were in a sea of fake deals making it impossible to actually find them.
I mostly bought mundane stuff and I’m turn didn’t leave disappointed. Disinfecting wipes, ibuprofen, etc.
Same.
Demand is through the roof so there is less excess inventory to try to move.
The only advice I can give is buy base on what you feel an item is worth to you.
I’m perfectly fine to keep searching for something for months before I finally make a purchase cause its the right price, color and model for me.
We need better tools and ability to track this stuff. Pretty amazing we can have a super powered chatbot that can answer any question but I can’t find an excel sheet that tracks historical prices of goods in a meaningful way.
Also I bet it would be illegal to create that excel sheet in some way.
There are many such apps. Search for price trackers.
There is actually a browser extension that tracks prices. Damn I forgot which one it is.
Camel Camel Camel is helpful when its statistics are available
Is there one for iOS?
yeah if you clicked the link it shows there is an iOS app.
In my opinion the best of this kind. you can browse amazon as usual and there is an extra window in if you scroll a little that shows the price history. No need to copie the link to another page to check the history.
CamelCamelCamel does this. I don’t remember if they have a browser extension though.
Not illegal. Check out CamelCamelCamel.com
Not fully legal either though. We’ll see much more pressure to make it illegal in the next few years
That’s just not true.
This article describes the grey area pretty well and it also links to a legal case.
https://www.scraperapi.com/blog/is-web-scraping-legal/
I believe we’re now entering a new era online. AI has now made scrapping a much more lucrative business. I think we will see a greater effort to build walls so company’s have to pay for this information. We’re dealing with people who get their way strictly through the court system. Reddit and twitter won’t be the last company to make these changes.
This next decade will be all about hording information online. Its like the modern day version of arguing whose cows were eating what on whose land. Lawyers are salivating at the next decade and the losers will be all of us.
Not only is such a thing not illegal, I found half a dozen in 2 seconds on Google.
ChatGPT could be used a trojan horse to get webscrapping made illegal. Companies will fight tooth and nail if people had a good ability to see their price history. There are apps to do it. But it requires a lot of time and the data isn’t always reliable or not available
I’ve been using Keepa for this for years in Firefox.
my credit union emailed me today about Prime Day deals, wtf?!?
Amazon started in may sending a massive email campaign to all affiliates with referral links reminding prime day, if an user buys something using the link, the affiliate (in this case your credit union) will get a 5% commission
more reasons to want to run for office in my credit union.
Common Amazon deception. Mark up a product’s base cost artificially, then take a “percentage off” to bring it back down to near the base price it always is. Maybe slightly more expensive or cheaper, but usually just a smidge away from the normal cost. It’s for the illusion of “being on sale.”
Use an Amazon price tracker site (like camel camel camel for example) so that you can always call out Amazon and make sure that you’re getting their actual lowest prices when you have to buy from them.
Furniture stores are infamous for that. They make a big deal of closing down for a day and marking every item in the store with a big discount, but what they don’t tell you is they jack the price way up first before applying the discount.
Classic Kohl’s strategy, not sure if they did it first, but its the first place I saw it used in early 2000s.
A handful of years back, JC Penney made a huge deal about stopping this practice in their stores, where everything is on “sale” all the time. Sales plummeted even though the actual product prices stayed the same. They immediately reversed course.
Hard to blame them. Human brains are weird.
As a marketing guy, I have this story in my back pocket to illustrate how hopelessly self-destructive we are.
Penneys also stopped accepting coupons and it turned out that most of the older ladies who made up the lion’s share of the clientele loved coupons (who would have thought?). They also hired a retail exec from Apple (Ron Johnson) and he embarked on disasterous changes to stores and other things that regular customers hated. This is a great article that is titled “The J.C. penney Disaster Timeline” from 2012: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jcpenney-disaster-timeline-how-ex-apple-guru-ron-johnson-is-destroying-the-company-2012-6
This shows consumerism as its finest (or worst). Easy for me to say control your urges but it does help by not buying any crap that you might think you want and clutter up your place
Can this power be learned?
You ever think about how we fully embraced the consumer lifestyle. Every minute of our life is now just an ad. From podcasts to Mr. Beast to sports. Its packaged as entertainment and fun but its all created to make us feel like we need to go buy something. Look at how enraged bud lite made people. That only happens to people whose identity gets twisted with products. People were legitimately hurt by a can of beer.
The 90s was this last ditch anti corporate anti consumerism lifestyle that I don’t think we’ll ever see again. Sub cultures need individuals to get popular and spread the message. But the only way to get popular today is to endorse and hawk merchandise because all our mediums of communication are owned by advertisers. The only purpose all the website, social media and others have is to act as hidden ads to get us to consume so how could anyone ever make headway who opposes that.
Hell majority of our censorship is due to ads. Companies want crisp clean PG spaces to put their products next too. They don’t want to risk controversy so they indirectly force company’s to remove anything that would create those risks.
I think we’re fucked and its only going to get more pervasive.
Yeah the 90s with their last-ditch checks notes utter dominance of shopping malls.
It’s fun to see Gen Xers be nostalgic for their subculture as if it were mainstream lol
It was pretty main stream. For decades before the 90s too. But the 90s was the last decade where it was popular.
Remember what fear grabbed the most attention. The most popular movie was usually some form of cultural warning about the spread of rampant consumerism.
The most popular horror movies at the time were zombie movies which are symbolically a warning about the rampant spread of a virus that turns everyone you know into a mindless consuming monster that hangs out at malls. Tons of music, art and content that pointed out how bad all this consuming is.
That doesn’t exist today like it did then. People were born into this crazy 24/7 commercialization of every inch of space they lay their eyes on. Most don’t even see that the majority of their free time is taken up by advertising and how it all erodes their ability to just enjoy something because anything you enjoy is an opportunity to capture your attention and your attention is an opportunity for someone to sell that space as a billboard.
It was much easier to see this stuff in the 90s because that was a transitional point between mass media into this social media doom scrolling attention capital we have today. Then a new generation took over who were born into this and don’t know anything else but this.
Meanwhile Gen Z is full of literal socialists.
Anti-consumer sentiment didn’t go away, it evolved.
Is it?
Literal socialists?
There’s some but i don’t think it’s full. Look at who gets paid on social media and gets the most attention. It isn’t the socialists. Its the prime, death water Hawking look at how rich I am while I sell you water in can at best buy that gen z but a lot of attention into. Follow the money. Gen Z is not full of socialists according to the content they consume
Yes, literal socialists and the “raise taxes on the rich wait no not me” people are both anti-consumer
Even the percentage claimed is just complete garbage. Zero proof of how many are actually sold, the counter could start at 70% sold for all we know. Even if there was proof, it’s still clearly just a “other people bought this so you aren’t stupid for buying it too”.
Really good manipulation there tbh. Someone probably got a raise for that
Fucking AnazonBasics pulled this shit with something I bought. Not quite as bad; it was still technically on sale, but only by $2 instead of the $7 they would have you believe.
Yea, I don’t assume anything is on sale until I’ve looked at camelcamelcamel.com. Even then, it doesn’t get lightning deals, and some other random promotions, so it can be difficult to tell what an actual good price is.
Yeah, I use Keepa for the same thing. I checked before I bought the item, but it surprised me to see Amazon’s brand pulling that stunt.
Use camelcamelcamel to check price history, really shows how “good” the sales are!
I do this for every item. I did buy some stuff this prime day and one item was in reality $5 cheaper… not the $15 Amazon said. I also sometimes find target, Walmart or Microcenter(frys) has just a good a deal: and those stores actually let you return stuff and give you your money back
Ingoe a good chuckle this morning when checking my Amazon cart and getting notifications of multiple items having lower prices and none had it increased.
