I have a new hobby/business selling used books on Amazon.
I’ve noticed that some listers on Amazon appear to use software that will automatically reprice their items for sale based on the prices competitors list. I’ve seen some of these “bots” reprice items by as much as 50% off of an item’s previous price based on overnight moves downward by a single competing dealer.
If I were to down-price my item overnight, wait for my competitor to price-match, snap up their down-priced item and then raise my own price on my item…
Would I be a jerk?
Would I be violating the listing site’s terms of service?
Would this violate any laws any dopers can think of?
Would it ever work?
A couple of notes.
I also realize that this wouldn’t work worth a hill of beans with the kind of item where there’s a sale every 3 minutes.
Assume the seller actually has the item and would sell it at the price in question were it ordered.
I’d say it’s slightly jerkish, but I also think that having a bot set your prices automatically based on other people’s prices is dumb, and kind of lazy. If you’re uncapable of paying attention to what a reasonable price is for your product then you have no business selling it and expecting to make a profit.
I have no idea whatsoever if your idea would work. And I have no idea about terms of service.
I don’t find it jerkish in the least. That’s business – exploiting the opportunities offered by a competitor. But that said, I don’t think it would work. You’d find yourself buying lots of books on the presumption that the price would bounce back up. It wouldn’t, necessarily, because you can’t predict what other sellers will do, or if new copies would come onto the scene – especially since the existing price will often motivate sellers to list a copy, usually below the lowest current price. Plus too with Amazon, you have no idea when a book will sell. If you pursue your strategy to exploit a $2.00 difference and then sit on the book for six months, you’re really not gaining anything.
I’m not saying it’ll never work, but I am saying that it will only work in special and somewhat rare situations.
Not Jerkish at all. In fact using automated repricing seems more jerkish to me (at least in the jerk = money grading and stupid sense).
I wonder if listing at a very hish price would persuade the automated systems to raise their prices. Certainly I see a lot of overpriced auctions for rareish items, so that when sold at the proper price they look like a bargain.
Well, if the other seller’s price is controlled by a bot, you can predict what it will do.
In the most extreme case, Mr. Slant could lower the price on his item to a penny, wait for his competitor’s bot to match it, and then buy him out. Then he puts his price back to normal (or slightly higher, since there’s one less competitor) and sells his original stock plus the copies he got for one cent each.
However, in order to make that work, you have to put your own items up for sale at that price. Someone could buy them when you do. It’s even possible that the competitor’s bot has some threshold below which it buys you out instead of lowering its own price.
It’s sneaky, but I think the risk involved means that you’re not automatically taking advantage of the other person, and minimizes the jerkishness.
I’ve had people snap up my items within a very short time of sropping my prices; I don’t know if they had something automatic set up to buy at the first sight of X item less than Y price, but I think you face a significant risk of this backfiring; instead of the competitors’ price dropping to beat yours, someone buys your underpriced item and you have to sell at a loss or cancel the sale(and I presume you can’t do that over and over with impunity).
I say give it a try, but I would assume that bot will not drop the cost all the way down to $0.01 just because someone else is selling it for that. I would assume that the bot is programed by the seller to drop the price to match within a range, with the lowest price still at a poin that the seller is willing to sell it at.
Thanks for the input!
Your responses are similar to what I got on a site populated wholly by online booksellers, so apparently the outrage at this practice I’d imagined isn’t common.
This whole discussion was prompted by my discovery of a bot that dropped its prices from $120 to… $50 when I price matched its listing at $120. It was a kind of WTF moment, and got me thinking what I would do if I wanted to buy up the entire online stock of that book… what would I have to pay?
I still haven’t DONE this, but I was curious as to how low I could con the competitor’s bot into pricing the relatively rare technical book in question.
Re: “my item sold quickly when I lowered my price”, I was thinking of doing this with items that don’t sell every day. There are books that ARE valuable but AREN’T so general-interest that a buyer comes along and looks for them every day, and all the game-player would have to do would be to drop his price for part of a day, until the bot did its daily price-match run, then unlist his item and buy up the competitor’s stock.
I’m not sure this would work, but could you list a photocopy of the cover of the book for a cheaper price? Or somehow have the title of the book in your selling listing while obviously not selling the book to real sellers? This way the bot might pick up your ad as selling the book and drop the price, but no real sellers take it as a actual book sale.
Experienced hands have determined that the bulk of Amazon buyers look at condition grade, sorted by the web site’s software, but DO NOT read product condition descriptions written by sellers.
The exceptions would be maybe 25% of the purchasing population and 99% of serious book collectors, most of whom actually use specialist venues like Abebooks, Biblio, Alibris or the ABAA (Antiquarian) site.
Still, good idea. It would certainly help to the extent that a “semi-slow” moving book was having its price gamed.
Moving towards devious ideas, it has occurred to me that the seriously unethical would have a much easier time doing this without risk of selling their books… “oops, I’m out of stock”. There are some other ideas I have which I won’t share for fear of providing excess aid to ne’er-do-wells.