Amazon dramatic fluctuating prices in short timeframes

[RejZoR]

Not sure if this is the right section to ask this sort of thing since I don't know where else to fit it in, but I'm wondering about something...

I was looking for a laptop, decided to give Amazon.de (German one since Slovenia doesn't have its own and this is where I usually pick things) a try and I found a perfect one for 380€. Great price, great specs. But I had to clear the credit limit on my credit card and 2 days passed by. When it cleared, I checked the same offering again and it was 420€. Whoa, that's quite a difference. But then out of curiosity, I tried same offering again maybe an hour later and all of a sudden it was 380€ again. But I was at work and couldn't buy it. Come to home all excited, the price is again showing 420€. WHAT!? And same repeated next day and that's when the price fluctuated between 420€ and 380€ again. Luckily I had my account on phone logged in where I quickly snapped the deal at the lower price of 380€. 40€ difference means I was able to pick the expedition delivery and still save almost 20€.

Question here is, is this a very common thing or just something I noticed for this exact offer? I understand that prices may change up or down and then stay on that for days or forever. But such repeated shifts in prices between two values in matter of hours even? That's something I've never experienced to date.

 

[Liviu Cojocaru]

I've seen prices going up and down on Amazon UK but not that often as you've described

 

[xvi]

I've seen prices jump up and down like this before. It's usually due to a new seller coming in at a lower price and then selling out, which brings the lowest price back up to the original seller.

I was watching a Noctua fan that dropped down to $10. That sold out from that seller pretty quickly and the price jumped back up to the next best price from a different seller. It went in and out of stock quite a bit and caused the price to do basically the same thing as what you saw. I never caught it at the cheaper price though.

There was a big stink made about this back during the hurricane in Florida. People were buying tons of packages of bottled water on Amazon. All the stores that had reasonable prices had sold out and the only ones remaining were stores that had the bottled water listed for ~$1500. The news article was something about how Amazon was hiking up prices and exploiting a natural disaster for profit, which wasn't true at all.

Sidenote, I don't know how many countries it works in, but I like to use Camel Camel Camel to track prices.

 

[FireFox]

Welcome to Amazon.de

 

[Ahhzz]

Not sure if this is the right section to ask this sort of thing since I don't know where else to fit it in, but I'm wondering about something...

I was looking for a laptop, decided to give Amazon.de (German one since Slovenia doesn't have its own and this is where I usually pick things) a try and I found a perfect one for 380€. Great price, great specs. But I had to clear the credit limit on my credit card and 2 days passed by. When it cleared, I checked the same offering again and it was 420€. Whoa, that's quite a difference. But then out of curiosity, I tried same offering again maybe an hour later and all of a sudden it was 380€ again. But I was at work and couldn't buy it. Come to home all excited, the price is again showing 420€. WHAT!? And same repeated next day and that's when the price fluctuated between 420€ and 380€ again. Luckily I had my account on phone logged in where I quickly snapped the deal at the lower price of 380€. 40€ difference means I was able to pick the expedition delivery and still save almost 20€.

Question here is, is this a very common thing or just something I noticed for this exact offer? I understand that prices may change up or down and then stay on that for days or forever. But such repeated shifts in prices between two values in matter of hours even? That's something I've never experienced to date.

I see that a good bit, as we do a lot of, if nothing else, comparison shopping there. I use an addon for chrome called The Camelizer, which refers to a historical chart for the pricing for an item. Calls back to a website camelcamelcamel.com. you might check that to see how it's been behaving

 

[Sasqui]

Very much the same in the US, but it's very product specific. I have a TON of stuff in my "saved for later" basket. Some products change daily by a few %, others by a lot, then others that never seem to change. Here's today's price notifications alone:

...guess it's time to jump on that grow light I'm into hydroponics and unfortunately pot is not legal yet in NH, so it's for growing veggies. I also bought a new Arc5 electric razor on black Friday, so I need to clean my bin up a little, lol ...not to mention the monitors.

 

[cakehunter]

They logged your IP, set cookie, they found out you got interested in that product and increased price. Then you visited from another computer (browser id, IP different) as a regular Joe just looking around and saw these sweet prices. I have read about this on reddit or here on TPU. It's not far from reality, and not that hard to set up for shops.

 

[RejZoR]

I thought about that, but it happened on same computer too.

 

[qubit]

They logged your IP, set cookie, they found out you got interested in that product and increased price. Then you visited from another computer (browser id, IP different) as a regular Joe just looking around and saw these sweet prices. I have read about this on reddit or here on TPU. It's not far from reality, and not that hard to set up for shops.

I seem to remember this sharp practice being in the news since it caused a backlash so Amazon dropped it. Perhaps they're still at it in some parts of the world? I wouldn't put it past them.