This is not new or specific to online retailers. I worked in retail for almost a decade before gettinng out.
On most products that don't have strict pricing guidelines from the manufacturer, prices can very wildly. Normal pricing would be a marked down price. When big sale would come, the tag price would go from the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) up to Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). Those prices are set by the manufacturer. The price printed on tags is MSRP. It is full price and is usually marked up quite a lot. With high end brands, MSRP is usually a lot higher than what MAP is. With brands like The Northface it can be $100 or more.
When a retailer runs a "big sale" they often put everything back up to full MSRP then mark it back down whatever percentage off they are offering.
Sometimes I would wait for a product to go on sale so I could get my employee discount plus sale price. There were many times when a huge sale plus my discount ended up being the same price or more than what the every day price was.
It’s definitely worse this year. All I’ve bought is some filament for my 3D printers and it’s really only a few bucks off. Seen a lot of things I was waiting on go on “sale” for the original price or higher
Amazon uses a system where they vary the price to try to see how much you’ll pay, too. Also they raise the price on things you bought before since they know you might want it again. Simply an awful system. For example, hot sauce… one time two bottles is 12, another time, 21, next time, 17. They’ve done the same thing to me on biscuit mix and bandages. One time the bandages are 7, then they’re 10, then they’re 13, then 6. I just want ONE PRICE.
I think they call this personalized dynamic pricing, and it’s used to extract the most money they can out of any one person. This shit should be illegal.
This has happened to me the last two years on Amazon with Prime Day and Cyber Monday.
I’ll have a few expensive items on my wishlist that I’m monitoring and holding out on for a sale, only to see the price go up right before the sale.
I used to spend hundreds during those sales but after getting shat on for two years I no longer participate. All their marketing hype is wasted on me because I simply don’t believe them anymore. Amazon has lost my trust.
Why are they doing this? Sure, it increase their short term profit, but this surely erode their users’ trust overtime. If they keep doing this, sooner or later people would no longer trust any kind of discount day anymore.
I work with online sales and that’s not what happens at all. Fake discounts just works, sadly, and people just won’t learn. I don’t really know why, maybe they use the “discount” as an excuse to themselves just to buy more stuff.
JCPenny tried to stop doing the fake sales and just go with actual pricing and it nearly broke them so they went back to the fake sales. They were even completely honest about it, letting everyone know they are the actual prices and the sales were fake and people weren't happy about it until they went back to the fake sales.
There were genuinely some good deals on Amazon yesterday though. I ended up buying a newer kindle for myself because it was the lowest price since last November according to camelcamelcamel.
In the Netherlands it’s now mandatory to use the lowest price of the previous 30 days as the base price. I believe that it’s based on EU legislation that will follow. I noticed yesterday that amazon.nl still ignores this and uses the “suggested retail price” instead (even if they’ve never used it).
I disagree.
While I have seen prices rise right before a sale, the discounted prices are almost always slightly less than what they usually go for.(In the case of Amazon, dunno about other sites)
Obligatory mention of camelcamelcamel.com which is a great tool to track the historical price of an Amazon listing. You can even set up alerts for when it falls to a certain price point.
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