Oddly enough, I managed to find some really cheap gum. Usually $4.50 on sale at the shops but I got 6x bottles / packs of it for 12 bucks. Pretty happy finding little bargains like that!
Fucking AnazonBasics pulled this shit with something I bought. Not quite as bad; it was still technically on sale, but only by $2 instead of the $7 they would have you believe.
Yea, I don’t assume anything is on sale until I’ve looked at camelcamelcamel.com. Even then, it doesn’t get lightning deals, and some other random promotions, so it can be difficult to tell what an actual good price is.
Camelcamelcamel is good, but Keepa has a browser extension that shows the price graph directly on the Amazon page, so you don’t have to go anywhere or click anything to see it.
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Yeah, I use Keepa for the same thing. I checked before I bought the item, but it surprised me to see Amazon’s brand pulling that stunt.
Really? It surprised you? It surprises me that surprised you. I would’ve been surprised if Amazon didn’t pull something like that
Also they stole the product from a former 3rd party seller
I called out best buy for this exact same practice years ago. I refuse to participate in mass sales now as a result. It’s all just a giant scam. Either blantant lies on pricing, or they use inferior parts for the sale items.
Even the percentage claimed is just complete garbage. Zero proof of how many are actually sold, the counter could start at 70% sold for all we know. Even if there was proof, it’s still clearly just a “other people bought this so you aren’t stupid for buying it too”.
Really good manipulation there tbh. Someone probably got a raise for that
Yeah in this one, the discount is 40% down from $119, but the regular price below says it’s $89
Common Amazon deception. Mark up a product’s base cost artificially, then take a “percentage off” to bring it back down to near the base price it always is. Maybe slightly more expensive or cheaper, but usually just a smidge away from the normal cost. It’s for the illusion of “being on sale.”
Use an Amazon price tracker site (like camel camel camel for example) so that you can always call out Amazon and make sure that you’re getting their actual lowest prices when you have to buy from them.
Furniture stores are infamous for that. They make a big deal of closing down for a day and marking every item in the store with a big discount, but what they don’t tell you is they jack the price way up first before applying the discount.
Classic Kohl’s strategy, not sure if they did it first, but its the first place I saw it used in early 2000s.
A handful of years back, JC Penney made a huge deal about stopping this practice in their stores, where everything is on “sale” all the time. Sales plummeted even though the actual product prices stayed the same. They immediately reversed course.
Hard to blame them. Human brains are weird.
As a marketing guy, I have this story in my back pocket to illustrate how hopelessly self-destructive we are.
Penneys also stopped accepting coupons and it turned out that most of the older ladies who made up the lion’s share of the clientele loved coupons (who would have thought?). They also hired a retail exec from Apple (Ron Johnson) and he embarked on disasterous changes to stores and other things that regular customers hated. This is a great article that is titled “The J.C. penney Disaster Timeline” from 2012: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jcpenney-disaster-timeline-how-ex-apple-guru-ron-johnson-is-destroying-the-company-2012-6
Prime Day is just Black Friday in July. Amazon is trying to get rid of old stock.
If you have an idea of what you want before the sale starts and know how much the standard price is you can still be lucky and get a good deal. You just have to be careful not to get sucked in to a non deal.
For example, I was looking out for an Apple Watch. There is a good sale on them but they only have a limited set of body and strap combinations. I don’t want any of the straps on offer so it negates almost all of the discount as I’d be paying £50 for a strap that I wouldn’t use.
This entire comment is the perfect explanation for my issue with people getting excited over Black Friday/Prime Day. I see so many people every year excitedly saying (or at times bragging), oh I got this, I got that, and it was so cheap. But unless you were already looking at that thing you haven’t saved money. You’ve actually spent more than you would have if it wasn’t on sale.
Aren’t there some website that track this?
I use the Keepa browser extension
I have no idea where the name came from, but there’s CamelCamelCamel.
The creator did an AMA on [redacted] and said that the site was initially just a side project, so the name didn’t matter. However, it started to get some traction. Then people knew it by that name, so it felt too late to change it. Now it’s way too late, so that’s the name
camelcamelcamel.com is the big one, I believe.
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Use camelcamelcamel to check price history, really shows how “good” the sales are!
I do this for every item. I did buy some stuff this prime day and one item was in reality $5 cheaper… not the $15 Amazon said. I also sometimes find target, Walmart or Microcenter(frys) has just a good a deal: and those stores actually let you return stuff and give you your money back
We need better tools and ability to track this stuff. Pretty amazing we can have a super powered chatbot that can answer any question but I can’t find an excel sheet that tracks historical prices of goods in a meaningful way.
Also I bet it would be illegal to create that excel sheet in some way.
There is actually a browser extension that tracks prices. Damn I forgot which one it is.
Camel Camel Camel is helpful when its statistics are available
In my opinion the best of this kind. you can browse amazon as usual and there is an extra window in if you scroll a little that shows the price history. No need to copie the link to another page to check the history.
Is there one for iOS?
yeah if you clicked the link it shows there is an iOS app.
CamelCamelCamel does this. I don’t remember if they have a browser extension though.
Not only is such a thing not illegal, I found half a dozen in 2 seconds on Google.
ChatGPT could be used a trojan horse to get webscrapping made illegal. Companies will fight tooth and nail if people had a good ability to see their price history. There are apps to do it. But it requires a lot of time and the data isn’t always reliable or not available
Not illegal. Check out CamelCamelCamel.com
Not fully legal either though. We’ll see much more pressure to make it illegal in the next few years
That’s just not true.
This article describes the grey area pretty well and it also links to a legal case.
https://www.scraperapi.com/blog/is-web-scraping-legal/
I believe we’re now entering a new era online. AI has now made scrapping a much more lucrative business. I think we will see a greater effort to build walls so company’s have to pay for this information. We’re dealing with people who get their way strictly through the court system. Reddit and twitter won’t be the last company to make these changes.
This next decade will be all about hording information online. Its like the modern day version of arguing whose cows were eating what on whose land. Lawyers are salivating at the next decade and the losers will be all of us.
There are many such apps. Search for price trackers.
I’ve been using Keepa for this for years in Firefox.
Not to defend Amazon, but in past years the comments in Reddit on this issue pointed out that Amazon has requirements on markdown percentages to qualify for prime day and lightning sales. As a result, vendors who control their price will artificially increase their price over the days leading to prime day and then apply the “discount”.
I do wish that if that were the case that Amazon actually address it as they should be able to detect that pattern. I unfortunately think they don’t care as they make money regardless. I just wish they care a bit more about earning and keeping trust.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8BPPQW
Here’s the product page. You can see how it’s 46% off $119, but if you want, you can also buy it at $89 regular price. They’re now not even increasing the price of the item, they’re just claiming it’s higher.
The normal price is $89.99, which represents a 15% discount off the MSRP of $119.99 (that they’re claiming). The current price of $64.99, is a discount of 42%, which represents an additional 27% off. I don’t think this listing necessarily proves the point.
That being said, companies absolutely do engage in this kind of bullshit. This one may have done it itself in order to claim the MSRP at $119.99.
Amazon could use the average price over the last 3 months l, but they don’t care.
Exactly. They have all the data in the world, but I’m sure they are doing what’s optimal for their profit.
Your screen shots don’t show the item being sold in the first one or the price in the second one. I fully believe Amazon is doing Amazon things but did you even look at your own pictures before making your post?
I screenshotted it from my phone, and I could only get so much in a screenshot. They are all the same items. Here’s a desktop screenshot. Looks like the item has been 90+ claimed since morning. Another scam.
So that’s the same price that was visible in the first one. Still no actual price shown from before Prime day.
May be my screenshots are confusing, because I didn’t screenshot the product page when I purchased. Look at my order details. The price is the same $89. But on line 3 there is a $45 promotion applied. That was because there was a 50% off coupon available on the page that I clipped. After the coupon, the price came down to $45. Now on Prime day, they brought down the price to $65, but they also dropped the coupon to 10%, so the effective price now is $59, which is a lot more than what I paid last week. Does that make sense?
The AMD 5800x3d prime day deal is 9% off at $401 CAD, but two days ago it was $359.
On the other hand, the Zotac RTX 4080 Trinity OC was $1589 CAD, and for prime day is $1229, an actual deal.
Except that the GPU is taking it on the chin on sales anyways. Probably a week from now it’ll be $1200 and they are just hoping to grab a few quick sales before the actual price drop
Absolutely right, we could see many 4080 cards drop to around 1200-1300. I hope we do.
I’m the only one who was very underwhelmed by this year’s Prime Day(s)?
I know it’s for clearing out their warehouses, but most of the sales were on crap or only minor discounts.
Every deal I was interested in I checked on camel camel camel. Everything was marked ~40% off but was really only like ~5-10% off. There were a few good deals, but they were in a sea of fake deals making it impossible to actually find them.
I guess you meant underwhelmed instead of understanding.
And well Idk I didn’t need anything so not sure. Personally the only thing I got was the Microsoft 365 Family subscription for 1 year since it was half a price than the usual renewall… Although now that I think about it maybe I should have bought more years.
I mostly bought mundane stuff and I’m turn didn’t leave disappointed. Disinfecting wipes, ibuprofen, etc.
Same.
Demand is through the roof so there is less excess inventory to try to move.
Ingoe a good chuckle this morning when checking my Amazon cart and getting notifications of multiple items having lower prices and none had it increased.
I was looking at a QNAP NAS box. When I added it to watch it was $589. Yesterday before prime day it was $573. This morning it was $582. Mid day it was back to $589.
Not a big difference and it wasn’t a prime day deal. But it’s more expensive than yesterday?
