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.
Automatically applied coupons, and deals that don’t even require prime could potentially do this without setting the "base price. Unnsire if thats the case, but it would likely not be picked up third party price trackers.
I do get different prices I have noticed from shared links but I also don’t have a prime account. The weirder part being that a lot of the time my prices seem lower without the account.
Or they would appear to work and would just be providing very wrong information
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.
Add something to your cart, you won’t see the coupon u till you’ve added it. It will have a button to “clip” the coupon thus applying the potential savings.
It’s scummy
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
The price must flow!
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
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.
Use Firefox and max out all of its security settings. When you do this, the fingerprint protection is so good that not even Google can ID my PC anymore. I have to pull out my phone and confirm it’s me every time I log in.
Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50
Some products have discounted prices for Prime members.
Neither of us has prime
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.
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.
Does no one cross ship any more for the best deal? I haven’t trusted online pricing in ages
What is cross ship?
What does that mean?
My guess is that it’s something like camelcamelcamel which shows the prices over time in a graph? Here’s an example of a frog plushie https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09RN4YCXG?context=search&cpf=new-used
People should never trust Amazon or the “% off deal” that Amazon is advertising. Always verify against camelcamelcamel.com to ensure that the price is actually a deal and not artificially inflated due to some demand spike or their algorithm thinking that you really need it right now.
I just used camel last night and bought a new oled monitor. It was offered to me 39 bucks cheaper than it ever has been on Amazon. 💜👏👌
- Cross shop
But does it fit you?
Yup, I have this same experience with my personal account vs. the business one I use at work. The business one has a higher price a lot of the time.
Well business will reimburse it so might as well get as much as they can. I’ve noticed it with hotels a lot.
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.
You do you, but I will say uBO can block all of those things, it just doesn’t do it all out of the box.
You have to subscribe to the right blocklists, or manually remove elements you don’t want from sites you visit frequently.
ABP offers you the convenience of not having to manually tinker with everything, which is what money is supposed to be used for - convenience.
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.
I wondered when this would happen. With all the data scraping, corporations are going to know your “Spending Potential,” and price items for you, specifically, according to your SP score. Believe it.
Edit: Aw, the Friedman Disciple MBA bros don’t like that. I am sad. Truly.
