Donald Kelly

Bad Timing or Bad Business?

Your probably looking at that image above and saying to yourself “wtf is that?”, I would be doing the same. However, from the perspective of the consumer, It could potentially mean a lot to you, and your wallet. Allow me to explain.

Above are two screenshots from Amazon, the top, being the order invoice page your able to view that pertains to an order you’ve placed on Amazon, it shows the items ordered, delivery date, and total with any applicable tax.

In this case, You’ll see that I ordered a book for $8.14 (a strange price, I may add) with $0.00 in shipping and $0.00 in tax, fair enough.

The second screenshot, is the item page itself, a mere 90 minutes after I placed my order, or a mere 15 minutes after my order went into the “Shipping Soon” stage, where Amazon dispatch the order to a wireless handheld an employee is using within one of it’s distribution centres, and your card is charged, most importantly, meaning you cannot cancel the order in that phase.

What’s startling about this, is the fact that within minutes of my order entering the “Shipping Soon” phase, the item price was raised.

Now you might be saying, “get some bollocks, it was raised less than $0.60” but the issue is that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. While it was less than 60 cents this time, it was a difference of nearly 18 dollars last time, and seven dollars the time before. If you have any brain function at all, you can see where this can add up, rather quick.

While I don’t have grounds to accuse Amazon of dodgy business tactics by any means, It is bizarre to say the least that on multiple occasions now, just moments after being charged for an item, the price of the item drops.

This could be a very limited sort of thing, or it could be effecting a large amount of consumers, who likely never bother looking at the item page of something they’ve ordered after placing that order, and could therefore be falling victim to this (if it was indeed a dodgy business trick) without having as much as a clue about it.

Like I said, I can’t accuse Amazon of anything here, but it is quickly become disturbing.