From November until January, I add interesting cds on Amazon.com to my cart. This way, I can only have things on my wish list that I really, really want and people can use that list to for Christmas and my January birthday shopping.
So, I’ll add items to my cart for these 3 months rather than putting them on my wish list. They’re usually classical CDs. Every time I go to the cart, I get endless messages saying the price of XYZ Symphony has decreased from 11.63 to 11.59 or ABC Concerto has increased from 10.25 to 10.29
None of these are best sellers. Many of them are fairly obscure recordings that I want to research further or perhaps see if the price of the download is significantly lower than the CD.
What is the purpose of these frequent small changes in price? These are recordings which probably only sell a small number of copies per year. I know that 11.99 ‘sounds’ cheaper that 12.00 but I don’t understand these very minor price changes.
They do large frequent changes too. I’ve had a computer on my wishlist since November, and it’s been priced everything from $530 to $650, and the price changes every 2-3 days. For a while it seemed to be because they were price-matching Staples, but Staples is now sold out (and unlikely to get this model back) as of ten days ago, and the price changes are continuing at Amazon.
Well, as you said, when they change the price it shows a message to you when you go the cart. Most people don’t have endless items in their cart, so it might remind them to buy stuff.
I think Amazon is trying to be helpful as well as prodding you to make the buy or take it off your list. It’d indeed be nice if Amazon would allow you to specify a price difference threshold, such as one dollar or more, before bothering you with the price change notices. But this is just a minor annoyance compared to how much I like Amazon’s overall customer service.
Are you sure these items are being sold by Amazon proper and not marketplace sellers who list their 3rd-party items on Amazon’s platform and site?
I’ll presume you mean Amazon proper.
In some cases:
It’s not being done by humans.
Amazon has bots that do this for them.
A human orders the item, then once it shows up a human sets the initial price and sets repricing guidelines for the item.
As market conditions change, and non-Amazon sellers who list through Amazon’s marketplace system set prices on the item, the bot checks its guidelines and matches their prices if their prices are within the guidelines set by the human product category manager type who initially listed it.
As competition thins out or raises its prices, the bot will raise its price to the initial level set by the manager.
I’ve seen products where the bot seemed to wiggle prices every two hours. I’ve seen other products that never move.
Another consideration is that some Amazon prices are arrived at by giving a certain percentage discount from the MSRP of an item.
Thus, quite a few books on Amazon are sold at 80% of MSRP.
From time to time, manufacturers raise or lower the MSRP for an item to compensate for changes in production costs, inflation, competition, etc. If the MSRP went from $15 to $17, for instance, the price would make a seemingly random jump from $12 to $13.60.