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Amazon Stops Giving Refunds When an Item's Price Drops After You Purchase It (recode.net)
Amazon has for years issued refunds to users when the price of an item drops after they've purchased it. But lately the e-commerce giant hasn't been doing that on a number of products, except for televisions, according to price-tracking companies. Recode reports: The move may have something to do with the rise of startups that track prices for Amazon customers and automatically request refunds when appropriate. One of them, a Santa Monica-based startup called Earny that is backed by the startup incubator Science, first pointed out the change. Earny scours a customer's email inbox for digital receipts, and then continuously checks the price on a retailer's website to see if it drops.
Yeah.... no.
If you bought before a price drop, deal with it.
Too many price drops and your storefront starts to look like Steam: people will only buy when the product is on sale for 50% or more.
between this, slave-like worker conditions in warehouses, and the increased number of items that can only be purchased by prime members, you are now in the evil club with google, facebook and microsoft. way to go!
to ask for the refund, however, when a larger number of customers started asking for the refund, then it was no longer cost-effective.
Newegg has a price matching policy, but they make no mention of matching their own prices.... Although they tell you to report any lower price within 3 weeks they will summarily ignore your email if the price you attempt to match is from newegg itself. That site has gone way downhill over the years.
Earny scours a customer's email inbox for digital receipts, and then continuously checks the price on a retailer's website to see if it drops.
My privacy is already eroded enough without handing some random app access to all my emails.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If yes, bummer. Pre-orders will drop, supplies will drop, prices will go up, and ... I see what you did there, Amazon.
Every week drop all prices 1 cent. And raise them up again next week.
Scummy... amazon!
... Amazon used to until people abused it. But they will probably still do it within a small time frame though for good customer service. otherwise all that's going to happen is people will return and rebuy the item at the lower price and Amazon will be out shipping.
I buy a TON of things from Amazon, I'm a heavy Prime customer...
That being said, my last three price adjustment requests in the past two weeks have all been denied, which is very odd.
I do it manually, just when I notice things... I buy at least a half a dozen items a week from Amazon.
This change will make me think twice before buying as much.
When I buy something with my credit card, the warranty is doubled, it is insured against loss for 90 days, and I get price matching for 60 days (from any retailer).
Admittedly there are some exceptions, but it's great. Many other credit cards offer similar perks.
All that price volatility with the almost guaranteed feeling of "losing out" when the price drops after the purchase is just going to piss off the customers. Same with the "targeted" pricing: Even if you never pay a higher price while browsing from an iPhone, once you've heard about it, you'll always suspect that you got ripped off. Big retailers think they're playing us like a fiddle, but they really screw themselves by ruining our willingness to pay a price that we perceive as fair.
Yup,
I have used the Egg for at least 10 years. Their return policy sucks...I had a Seasonic power supply go bad (third one in 2 years- talk about a brand gone down hill) and I bought a new one on the Egg.
But the new one was DOA (yup, it was another SeaSonic). I had to pay return shipping on a defective product. I don't mind paying return shipping if I change my mind or I bought the wrong item. But if it is defective?
So I ordered a Roswill to replace it and all is well.
at the lower price. It only makes sense for the merchant to just adjust the price and refund the difference. It makes things easier for everyone. If a merchant refuse to do that, the customer can just return the product and repurchase adding cost to the merchant. Merchants who cannot see that just adding more problems to themselves and alienate the customers at the same time. Unless they also change their refund and return policy.
For years I have used Amazon to do price checks to see what I should pay. Last week I need a can opener and checked Amazon and found Walmart about 10% cheaper on the model of interest. Curious, I then checked an old-line big box retailer (unnamed so this isn't a shrill for them), it was 20% cheaper than Walmart. Yup, same item, same model number.
For several years Fry's has had by far the best CPU prices, but you can bet I'll still check before buying my next CPU.
It's an example of a few bad apples (people trying to make a business of refunds) ruining everything. It's in a retailer's interest to just refund the difference, but only as long as a small % of people actually do. They know few people will want/care enough/find it financially sound to do a return+repurchase, but the number of people who might participate in something like the mentioned services is substantial.
You mean a large number of robots. Once again, assholes ruin it for everyone else.
Seriously, this is so much easier to deal with Best Buy these days. They price match Amazon (although not the 4rd part resellers) and other retailers, and will price match themselves during the return period. As a member, I also get a 45 return period on nearly everything, plus free 2 day shipping for online orders. Last year, I even got them to price match a TV I purchased in October with the Thanksgiving weekend sale price, saving me about $600.
Nuff said.
Tim
Amazon's pricing isn't that sophisticated. They do yo-yo prices on a very regular basis, often-times in concert with changing which 3rd party vendor is sells no the item.
Anyone who snakes through a dishonest and easily closed loophole deserves to be decapitated when it closes. To Earny's startup hipsters: HA HA!
Earny, by automating it (and siphoning off a percentage), spoiled it for the rest of us.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I remember emailing them over 5 years ago trying to get a price match after they dropped the price on an item a few days after I ordered it. They said they no longer had a price matching policy.
That's why I use extensions like keepa, that show the price history of a product on amazon and also lets me set target price alerts. Its like stock trading.
Amazon has said (when they were trying to get publishers to agree to lower/variable prices) that their prices are set to generate maximum income, i.e. max profit x volume. You lower the price if you feel more people will buy it to justify the lower price, and Amazon apparently has great algorithms to do that. Now, if people can retroactively get the difference it is still doable if they are just a few so that you can ignore them and "eat" the difference. If many people started to do this with automated services, then it either becomes pretty much impossible to calculate the optimal price-drops, and/or you result in smaller price-drops to account for the refunds, meaning you end up with a smaller volume as well (due to the less desirable price), so overall it starts hurting Amazon sales.
I've been a heavy Prime user for many years (first in the US, now in the UK) and apart from the refunds, Amazon has been really great with me in numerous occasions (when the manufacturer was unhelpful, long after Amazon's return window), so I won't mind these refunds going away.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
While using apps to compare prices on groceries while shopping, it occurred to me that it would seem to be the sort of task an AI would be good at. Right now Siri tries to take you to iTunes when you ask about music, and I imagine Alexa offers to let you order all kinds of things from Amazon, but an AI not tethered to a vendor would be much more useful. It would be extremely disruptive to retailers and advertising would be extremely difficult. Imagine dictating a shopping list to an AI that could compare price per unit, have a whitelist of brand names that you consider interchangeable, and would be able to target 'free shipping' price minimums.
I did this with Newegg a few days ago. Needed to buy 20TB of storage, I could get 3x4TB drives for a combo price, but i need 5. They would only honor the combo price in packs of 3, ordered it + the other 2 I needed. The NEXT day, promo code good for up to 5 drives for $20 off the (already discounted) price which put it about $5/drive less than the combo price. After about 45 minutes and me threatening to return for refund and just order the drives at the discounted rate, they decided to honor the price change. Oddly enough, if they would've just given me the combo price, I wouldn't have said a word about the promo code, but that made it a ~$40 discount over what I paid, and it was free shipping so I wouldn't have been out anything but time.
Bro, newegg sold out years ago! I don't know why people are still surprised by this kind of stuff.
That's fine. Just do a price match via your credit card. Most of them offer this service for free.
Eat more bacon!
Amazon is beta testing an auto repricer in their back end that all Amazon sellers will have access to. This will mean even more price fluctuations, both up and down, but usually down. They stand to lose a lot of everyone want a refund.