Same product, same vendor, to same address, same day, same shipping, same billing address, but different customer, different price $8.63 vs $12.37. 43% higher price for me than for the Internet Archive. In fact I checked the price for me an hour before and the day after the Internet Archive bought it, so I do not think it is the vendor changing the price by this much.
Below are the receipt for the Internet Archive, offer to me, and offer to my home business account (same price as the Internet Archive). Turns out I stumbled upon “Business Pricing.” It’s a “feature.” Business Prime costs $179/year, as opposed to consumer Prime for $99/year.
Yikes. Shakes my confidence, and seems like we could be on our way to “redlining.”
What price to do you see for https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089PBTV2 ?
The first thing to note is that you didn’t buy the markers from Amazon, you bought them from “The Mega Deals” who use Amazon as a storefront. Amazon has no control over the pricing of independent sellers’ pricing. Second, because many products are sold on Amazon by different resellers, they each constantly adjust their prices to try to sell more. Some use automated tools that adjust their price to track other sellers (these automated systems sometimes get caught in undercutting cycles where a price will drop very quickly and very low for a short period of time before one of the sellers runs out of stock or adjusts their pricing or algorithm. You can see the price history of this item on http://www.camelcamelcamel.com: https://camelcamelcamel.com/Sharpie-Permanent-Markers-Point-Black/product/B0089PBTV2
This shows a range of $0.98 to $15.77 over the past year.
does not seem to be the reason in this case: I could flip back and forth between prices by changing the accounts.
Your order was from a third party seller, “The Mega Deals”. Looks like you got their last one, because now that same listing says “Shipped from and sold by Amazon”.
Mystery solved. 🙂
does not seem to be the reason in this case: I could flip back and forth between prices by changing the accounts.
That is likely Amazon reserving stock when you browse to see the item. This particular behaviour was well documented for things like the NES Classic when it was released and supply was far below demand. Certain accounts continued to see the item as ”in stock” after it was ”sold out” to others.
Occam’s razor and all that.
I got $12.38 checking that link from the Netherlands
I’m seeing the non-business price $12.37
and I’m not prime
$9.94 at midnight on 6/19 from the Eastern US