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Why are there sellers that sell for above amazon listing price?

tortillasoup

tortillasoup

Golden Member
I've noticed there are a lot of listings on amazon where there are sellers that are selling items above what amazon lists their items for sale. The question I have is, why would they do this? I mean for example try the fitbit here: http://www.amazon.com/Fitbit-Wireles...rds=Fitbit+one

It's $94 from amazon with normal price like $99... Then when you go and select, "50 new from $92.50" down below the listing, http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...&startIndex=40

you've got products and $180, $200, $300 and $800 from "Tokyo Blue sea market"... That's just nuts! Why do these other sellers even bother listing their item at such ridiculous prices?
 
You see the exactly same thing on eBay and it's always been like that. A product that retails for $200 could be found for $600, $900, $1500. I figure they just hope to snag a clueless buyer every once in a great while. Probably makes it well worth their time if they do.
 
the pricing you mention is extreme but there are sellers who might sell something for, say $120, and someone might buy from them because they have good feedback or because it looks like they are local (live in california? why order from a seller in ny when you could order from a guy in ca and get it sooner) or because they ordered another item from the same seller (say they buy a phone charger and then realize the same seller sells phone cases also). the buyer then drop ships the item directly from amazon. the "seller' makes 120-94=26 and amazon get to sell the item twice (that is why amazon likes drop shippers)

also i dont know if this is true, but does amazon sell preferential spaces in their listings? i think they do because ive seen higher priiced merchants come up first. that would enable someone to do the above quite effectively.

amazon is a very shady operation. their revenues would probably be a third lower if they didnt allow this type of stuff
 
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Carson Dyle said:
"Allow"??? What are they going to do? Make sure all their sellers conform to some pricing standard? That's ridiculous.
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i wasnt referring to pricing, i was referring to letting people who dont have items drop ship them from other sellers, such as amazon themselves. do you realize that most of those sellers selling that item for prices higher than amazon is selling for dont actually have inventory. you might say, why does someone try to sell that item for $180, they are just spending money buying and storing inventory that isnt going to move. the secret is that they dont have inventory at all, they are just going to buy the item from amazon for $94 and give them your address, so they arent losing money if the item doesnt sell, its totally riskless for them. most of the "sellers" at amazon arent stores at all, they are just dudes behind computers scamming dummies all day

also, businesses arent as price sensitive as consumers. all the stuff they buy is going to be an expense anyway, and the dude ordering for them probably doesnt care how much hes paying for stuff, the factor i mentioned above are more important
 
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OBLAMA2009 said:
i wasnt referring to pricing, i was referring to letting people who dont have items drop ship them from other sellers, such as amazon themselves. do you realize that most of those sellers selling that item for prices higher than amazon is selling for dont actually have inventory. you might say, why does someone try to sell that item for $180, they are just spending money buying and storing inventory that isnt going to move. the secret is that they dont have inventory at all, they are just going to buy the item from amazon for $94 and give them your address, so they arent losing money if the item doesnt sell, its totally riskless for them. most of the "sellers" at amazon arent stores at all, they are just dudes behind computers scamming dummies all day

also, businesses arent as price sensitive as consumers. all the stuff they buy is going to be an expense anyway, and the dude ordering for them probably doesnt care how much hes paying for stuff, the factor i mentioned above are more important
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I don't think you understand how Amazon fulfilment services work.

Just because it came out of an Amazon warehouse doesn't mean that Amazon ever owned the item.

Viper GTS
 
Viper GTS said:
I don't think you understand how Amazon fulfilment services work.

Just because it came out of an Amazon warehouse doesn't mean that Amazon ever owned the item.

Viper GTS
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i think u dont. yes amazon stores and ships for people under their fulfilment services, but they also sell something like fitbit themselves, and they are happy to drop ship that item for someone who wants to relist it

it doesnt matter who owns the item anyway, the point is that amazon will let another seller list that item, and then drop ship it from any other seller at amazon, in order to get double orders
 
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Put an item in your cart and let it sit there for a month. You'll notice that weekly or in some cases daily the price fluctuates. Sometimes it fluctuates dramatically. I've seen used books go up and down by a factor of 4 every day. I've always suspected that it was for those people who are slow to buy (maybe because they are saving up enough items for the free shipping). Put it in the cart at $10, by the time you order it a few days later it may be $25. They just hope you don't notice that change amongst the half dozen (sometimes more if you select a gift) data pages Amazon forces you to go through to order.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but it does show how an item can easily go from below Amazon price to above it.
 
OBLAMA2009 said:
it doesnt matter who owns the item anyway, the point is that amazon will let another seller list that item, and then drop ship it from any other seller at amazon, in order to get double orders
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It doesn't work like that.
Amazon does let their Fulfillment stock co-mingle with their own store stock, but they keep track of orders and quantities tagged per seller so that, even though they have 25 of Item X in the warehouse, the database knows that 15 of those belong to Amazon, 7 to Seller Y, and 3 to Seller Z. Whereas the database also tracked that Seller Y and Seller Z both originally had 50 of Item X stored in the Amazon Warehouse.

Amazon doesn't get "double orders" - it does not and cannot work like that, or the system would be so broken they wouldn't be able to attract sellers.
 
And also consider that Amazon changes prices all day every day. So a 3rd party seller might have been undercutting Amazon's price when they first put their item up.

First time I used camelcamelcamel to monitor Amazon's price on a particular item I was very surprised to see how often it changed - up and down, all the time.
 
destrekor said:
It doesn't work like that.
Amazon does let their Fulfillment stock co-mingle with their own store stock, but they keep track of orders and quantities tagged per seller so that, even though they have 25 of Item X in the warehouse, the database knows that 15 of those belong to Amazon, 7 to Seller Y, and 3 to Seller Z. Whereas the database also tracked that Seller Y and Seller Z both originally had 50 of Item X stored in the Amazon Warehouse.

Amazon doesn't get "double orders" - it does not and cannot work like that, or the system would be so broken they wouldn't be able to attract sellers.
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can you read? this doesnt have anything to do with amazon fulfillment. amazon fulfillment is for sellers who actually have inventory and shipped it to amazon.

im talking about sellers who drop ship. thats where someone sees someone else selling an item, and then tries to sell it themselves at a higher price, and when they get an order, they then order that item from the original seller and give them the buyers address for shipment.

lets say youre selling an iphone 6 in "good" condition for $100 on amazon. i could go to amazons site, and advertise your iphone 6 for $200. i might have some hook that gets me a sale (i could describe your item as "very good", i could get a buyer who wants to order from my state, whatever). when someone purchases the phone from me for $200 i then order it from you for 100, provide you with the buyers address and have you ship it to them. bingo ive made 200-100=100 profit, all without owning an item and without even having to ship anything. imagine if i listed a million items, i might get 100 orders a day, id make a pretty good profit without doing any work and without having to store any inventory.

why does amazon allow/encourage this? because it allows them to get commisions on TWO orders instead of just one for every sale that occurs (the buyer purchased the iphone and then i purchased it from you)
 
interesting, is it worth it to sell my stuff on amazon vs the bay during my upgrades. I can't believe how much computer and electronic stuff I buy each year and don't really use.
 
why don't you email "Tokyo Blue sea market" and ask them why they are listing the item at such ridiculous high price?
 
kranky said:
And also consider that Amazon changes prices all day every day. So a 3rd party seller might have been undercutting Amazon's price when they first put their item up.

First time I used camelcamelcamel to monitor Amazon's price on a particular item I was very surprised to see how often it changed - up and down, all the time.
Click to expand...

Amazon's dynamic pricing drives me crazy. It's sad when we have to game the system by deleting cookies, using a different browser, proxy/VPN, or private/incognito mode. I've even had a few instances where prices vary widely for the same item on a laptop, desktop and cell phone.

I would highly recommend CCC's camelizer browser add-ons available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari users. Here it is in action, hmmn I never knew it works on Newegg.com as well, sweet. Sorry Lynx, Opera and IE folks.
 
OBLAMA2009 said:
also i dont know if this is true, but does amazon sell preferential spaces in their listings? i think they do because ive seen higher priiced merchants come up first.
Click to expand...

No: the listing order shows only the item price, but the listing order is strictly by the bundled price of: item + shipping.
Example: a 3rd-party seller can offer an item for one cent + $4.99 shipping, while Amazon itself may offer the same item for $4.95 + "free shipping" (with $35+ purchase, or "free with Prime"). So the shopper always has to mentally calculate which of the 2 is the better "final price". And also whether they think that buying from a 3rd-party (after checking the vendor's feedback rating) is worth the potential added risk, as far as item quality, return policy, etc.
 
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OBLAMA2009 said:
the pricing you mention is extreme but there are sellers who might sell something for, say $120, and someone might buy from them because they have good feedback or because it looks like they are local (live in california? why order from a seller in ny when you could order from a guy in ca and get it sooner) or because they ordered another item from the same seller (say they buy a phone charger and then realize the same seller sells phone cases also). the buyer then drop ships the item directly from amazon. the "seller' makes 120-94=26 and amazon get to sell the item twice (that is why amazon likes drop shippers)

also i dont know if this is true, but does amazon sell preferential spaces in their listings? i think they do because ive seen higher priiced merchants come up first. that would enable someone to do the above quite effectively.

amazon is a very shady operation. their revenues would probably be a third lower if they didnt allow this type of stuff
Click to expand...

buy box algorithm is private but basically it's not limited to the lowest priced product. as long as it's priced close to the low for the item it has a chance to win the buy box. fba items also get priority. if there's no fba sellers then you will see a mfa item with the buy box.
 
Maybe they don't have the product in stock but expect to get more in several months later and they don't want to remove the listing and have to pay to put it back up so they just jack the price up to something ridiculous so no one buys it.
 
The only reason I see is for them to earn more. I am not a seller so probably Amazon doesn't have a rule about pricing an item above Amazon's listing. It's a seller responsibility whether he/she wants to earn or not.
 
Not everyone will look at every single item in the search listings so if the more expensive one happens to rank higher when someone is searching they might just buy it not knowing there's a cheaper one that's the same thing.
 
Amazon is fun. I put an item in my shopping cart a week ago for $39.99. Every time I visit the site, it's gone down five, six, fourteen, twenty cents. It's now $38.43. Tell me they're not trying to entice me to pull the trigger and buy that stupid thing?
 
What I don't like about Amazon is how it seems to all be 3rd party sellers now, anything through 3rd parties takes forever to ship. I guess they use a JIT inventory system so they item gets shipped to Amazon only when someone makes an order then it gets shipped to you. #firstworldproblem I guess, though. 😛
 
Slew Foot said:
no tax from fulfulled by amazon can make an item cheaper.
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Only if you are willing to break the law and not pay the tax. Just because they don't collect the tax doesn't mean you don't have to pay it. It just so happens that most people ignore that part of the law.
 
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