My girl was looking for a dress for Halloween. Yesterday she found one on Amazon for € 35 and put it in the cart, but did not buy it. Today she looked it up again and it was € 50 so she asked me to look it up with my phone with my Amazon account - it turned out to be € 23 for me, less than half of what it’s for her!

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    2 months ago

    Sure it’s the same seller?? I’m pretty sure Amazon does not show different prices to different people. But the same product is often offered by several sellers, for different prices. And if for example one of you has Prime and fast shipping activated, it’ll show the fastest option. Which might be more expensive. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening here. It’ll say somewhere: Sold by XY, ships from Amazon.com. Make sure it says the same thing there.

    Of if she put it into the cart and now Amazon sticks with the exact option… If the specific seller increased their prices over night, the shopping cart might stick to the seller and it becomes more expensive for her… While Amazon will offer you a different seller that’s cheaper today. But everyone can choose which seller to buy from, if there are multiple for a product.

    • cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      Price tracking systems like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel wouldn’t work if they started doing this. I can verify that, when I get alerts, the price on Amazon is the same as the alert price.

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        yeah and I’ve done a lot of chatting about amazon products online at reddit, forums, etc over the last 20 years or whatever and never once seen people get different prices on the same amazon link.

        • lunarul@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          There are definitely different prices when I’m logged in vs when I’m not. My wife sends me a links to products, and I usually open any link in incognito windows. Several times I was not seeing the same price as her. Opening the same link on my account would show the same price.

          • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 months ago

            Automatically applied coupons, and deals that don’t even require prime could potentially do this without setting the "base price. Unnsire if thats the case, but it would likely not be picked up third party price trackers.

        • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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          2 months ago

          I do get different prices I have noticed from shared links but I also don’t have a prime account. The weirder part being that a lot of the time my prices seem lower without the account.

    • IamAnonymous@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This is the answer. I wanted to buy a pole saw and kept seeing different prices just throughout the day and later I noticed that it was from different sellers

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Yeah I’ve definitely been caught off guard by the different sellers selling identical products before. Check the URL and see if the ID is the same, it probably won’t be.

    • chaospatterns@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yeah there’s a few reasons why the offer that wins the buy box (the term for which merchants offer is shown to the customer prominently) and is complex, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly sinister or designed to mislead. If one person has prime and the other doesn’t, it might weight more towards a prime offer which may be more expensive, a price from a merchant may have changed, or gone out of stock.