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!
Does no one cross ship any more for the best deal? I haven’t trusted online pricing in ages
- Cross shop
What is cross ship?
What does that mean?
My guess is that it’s something like camelcamelcamel which shows the prices over time in a graph? Here’s an example of a frog plushie https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09RN4YCXG?context=search&cpf=new-used
People should never trust Amazon or the “% off deal” that Amazon is advertising. Always verify against camelcamelcamel.com to ensure that the price is actually a deal and not artificially inflated due to some demand spike or their algorithm thinking that you really need it right now.
This is an industry wide thing.
Some vendors detect if you are on a Mac, and the assumption is.you have money, and therefore the prices are higher
changing my user agent to Brave so everyone thinks I lost my money to scams
If they detect that you’re using a 19 year old ThinkPad with Arch linux, they aggressively increase the price on thigh-high rainbow socks.
They do the same as the airlines, if they see you have interest they raise the ticket price
Motels and hotels have been doing this for decades. Check out room prices in college towns on game weekend.
I learned about supply and demand in middle school.
Yep. Dynamic pricing.
Other people have reported it with travel sites when looking at flights, you get different prices on a Mac vs windows.
Vendors of any ilk would love to be able to adjust prices per customer.
I need to try with my user agent set to a Chromebook. Maybe I’ll even get a discount.
(TLDC - Price history tracking plugin)
Amazon countered price tracking by introducing coupons that only apply at checkout. Some products only use coupons for discounting now.
Just be aware that these prices may not be the true lows.
That explains why I see coupons more and more. Ty.
I’ve never seen a coupon on amazon
It’s often a checkbox in green near the checkout button if the item and can be the most absurd percentages that shift daily and are often better discounts than sale days.
Yes, and Prime-only discounts, so they cannot easily be scraped.
I only serf Amazon on private without being logging in, if I find something I like, then I copy the link to my regular browser.
If you’re not gonna give a lurker a good price, I’m not interested.
Some products have discounted prices for Prime members.
Neither of us has prime
I haven’t experienced that, but I used to do my amazon purchases at the end of the month until I noticed all the prices get raised around that time. So now I shop without rhythm to not attract the price inflation worm
The price must flow!
But does it fit you?
Clear her browsing data and try again, this happens with flights too.
This is why fingerprinting is an issue.
Sidenote. I went to by a boxset of books for my partner and it was ~50 for the set, I got back to pay the next day and it is 100. On ye third day it is ~70 with a note that it is down from 110. Scumbaggery.
Use Firefox and max out all of its security settings. When you do this, the fingerprint protection is so good that not even Google can ID my PC anymore. I have to pull out my phone and confirm it’s me every time I log in.
Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50
Then what about 🐪🐪🐪?
Another comment pointed out that apparently amazon fighting this with coupon system
Adblock premium cost is wildly different based on location.
Using a VPN I have found everything from $15/yr to $40/yr
I pay for Mullvad VPN, that’s €60/yr ($65)
I know it’s much but I prefer mailing them a letter with the money to stay anonymous
I buy IVPN sub with Monero, so it’s private. I’mma try Mullvad next time.
I think it’s neat. You create an account, without an email address, you just get a random number, choose a password. Then you have the option to send them a letter containing the money and a piece of paper with your random number and they’ll add the time to your account.
Or you can use any other form of payment, including monero
I am using mullvad vpn as well.
I am saying that AdBlock premium has a different cost based on your location, which you can switch with your VPN.
Use uBlock origin instead. Cost is $0 forever, and it has the best adblocking by far.
You can augment that with an NextDNS account to do ad filtering at the DNS level. It is a pay service technically, but their free tier is very generous.
It is not the best adblocking by far, that is not accurate.
It is better than the free AdBlock extension, yes. It is not better than AdBlock premium. No more cookies popups, no more floating video players on news sites, no more mailing list popups. These are three things that you do not get with ublock origin. I know because I use both.
I already use adgaurds DNS, which is free.
Lastly, I’m more than happy to pay $15/yr to a company fighting a fight I believe in. Now, I wouldn’t pay $40/yr, but if all I need to do is change my VPN from New Jersey to Montreal to get more than 50% off that price, it’s a no brainier.
My only complaint is they don’t have a Firefox mobile extension, so when I’m on my phone I’m stuck with janky-ass ublock origin and nothing better.
You do you, but I will say uBO can block all of those things, it just doesn’t do it all out of the box.
You have to subscribe to the right blocklists, or manually remove elements you don’t want from sites you visit frequently.
ABP offers you the convenience of not having to manually tinker with everything, which is what money is supposed to be used for - convenience.
Whatever works for you.
Personally, I have none of the above issues with Unlock origin. Its deeply tunable, so after adding a few lists past the default, it stops all the above.
You’re paying for an ad blocker? uBlock origin is free and fully featured.
that’s just regional pricing. it makes sense and is pretty standard.
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, with 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or they would appear to work and would just be providing very wrong information
I wondered when this would happen. With all the data scraping, corporations are going to know your “Spending Potential,” and price items for you, specifically, according to your SP score. Believe it.
Yup, I have this same experience with my personal account vs. the business one I use at work. The business one has a higher price a lot of the time.
