What’s this all about? I put a book in my basket at Amazon.co.uk, then realised that I wasn’t logged in. After logging in and visiting my basket I was told:
Please note that the price of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days has increased from £11.87 to £16.19 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
A £5 increase in 30 seconds? Something’s not right about that methinks. It makes me wonder if Amazon are adjusting prices based on their knowledge of my purchase history. I seem to recall them doing this before and getting slapped down since this kind of practice is illegal in many places. Slashdot has a story on it from 2000, Amazon Refunding The Overcharge Experiment, in which Amazon claim it was an “experiment”. Hmmm. I wonder what prices other people are seeing for that item?
(BTW, it’s very telling that slashdot’s URLs work fine, but the cnet.com article linked in their item has vanished)
I wonder whether an extension that uses an Amazon webservice to display a “price from the wild” panel on each Amazon page might be in order? Like bookburro, only: a) amazon specific; b) called something like: ‘keeping amazon honest’? ;-)ie turn their web services back on them? It could also give the price history for the item (http://www.programmableweb.com/api/AmazonHistorical) ;-)tony
Neat idea Tony. That could work as a greasemonkey plugin I suspect.
i’ve noticed this behaviour with Juno (the online record store). but since the prices have always been lower after signing in and/or adding to cart i’ve always thought ‘hmm cool’ instead of ‘hmm evil’
The price I’m seeing at Amazon.co.uk, as someone who has no account there, is also 16.19.
The more likely possibility is that Amazon uses some complex algorithm based on a variety of factors to determine how to price their books, and one of those factors is the number of users with the book in their shopping cart, the number of users who have visited the item page, or something to that effect…
I have an Amazon account and it priced it at £11.87!
its now priced at £17.99 – perhaps all the clicks to it that your article has generated have increased the pricing!