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Maybe some of have already seen this, but I hadn't seen it until it bit me in the ass today. Amazon is listing some of its standard products as Prime only, meaning only Prime members are allowed to buy it. Prime is an Amazon subscription service that gives you free 2-day shipping (to your local post office, not to your door), streaming services, and a bunch of other 'benefits'. They have gone to great lengths to push this $99 a year service on people, including delaying normal shipments and preventing you from buying what you want. I no longer qualify to reorder a SSD I bought last week since I'm not willing to become a member (nor can I try the 30 trial as I did that back when Prime was new). All that SSD research time wasted.
We were worried about net neutrality. It seems in the future we'll have to worry about subscribing to every store we want to do business with just to have the privilege of buying from them. I'll bet money within a couple years you won't qualify for sales like Cyber Monday unless you're a subscriber. I can easily see that spreading to every store: "Pay $10 at the door for big savings on all our in-store, on sale items." Stores used to give you discounts for going to them, now you'll have to pay for the honor of shopping there.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @03:53AM
> How many people realize that when they click on a product from Amazon, they may or may not see the same price that I see? Targeted marketing. ...
I may have discovered another variant of this? I have never purchased from Amazon[*] but recently I bought some window insulation film from an eBay seller. It was a good price, with free shipping, came in two days. When it arrived there was Amazon paperwork inside--it looks like this eBay seller was using Amazon for fulfillment?
If I wanted to feel paranoid, I'd say that Amazon saw me coming...and to snag me as a customer they targeted me without exposing the Amazon brand...
* Long story. Many years ago when Amazon was mostly a bookseller, our small, technical book publisher refused to meet the Amazon price discount demand. As retribution, Amazon listed our book as "out of print". Shortly after, I started getting emails from prospective customers, "Do you have any copies left?" The book was never out of print... Amazon has been hell on small specialty book publishers and I'm unlikely to ever buy from them knowingly.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 14 2016, @07:10PM
You've discovered "arbitrage". You just paid a higher price to some guy on Ebay who didn't even have the product, so he could turn around and buy it from an Amazon seller (or Amazon itself) at a lower price, and pocket the difference. Ebay is chock full of sellers like this.
You really have to do your research when buying either on Amazon or Ebay. The same thing exists on Amazon; I've seen sellers on Amazon selling an automatic litter box for 3-4x the manufacturer's price, because the manufacturer only sells direct; they're hoping some idiot will really pay $1600 for something they can get straight from the manufacturer for $450. Enough people probably fall for it to make it worth it.