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Amazon's Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback (nytimes.com)
Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace. Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon. From a report: "Zowie," the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, "One Snowy Knight," being offered for four figures. One was going for "$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping," she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed. "How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?" Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. "Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side," she said.
Amazon is by far the largest marketplace for both new and used books the world has ever seen, and is also one of the most inscrutable. The retailer directly sells some books, while others are sold by third parties. The wild pricing happens with the latter. [...] Third-party sellers, Guru Hariharan, chief executive of Boomerang Commerce, said, come in all shapes and sizes -- from well-respected national brands that are trying to maintain some independence from Amazon to entrepreneurial individuals who use Amazon's marketplace as an arbitrage opportunity. These sellers list products they have access to, adjusting price and inventory to drive profits. Then there are the wild pricing specialists, who sell both new and secondhand copies.
"By making these books appear scarce, they are trying to justify the exorbitant price that they have set," said Mr. Hariharan, who led a team responsible for 15,000 online sellers when he worked at Amazon a decade ago. [...] A decade ago, Elisabeth Petry wrote a tribute to her mother, the renowned novelist Ann Petry. "At Home Inside," published by the University of Mississippi Press, is now out of print, but late last week secondhand copies were for sale on Amazon. A discarded library copy was $1,900. One seller offered two copies, each for $1,967, although only one was described as "Nice!" All these were a bargain compared with the copy that cost $2,464.
Amazon is by far the largest marketplace for both new and used books the world has ever seen, and is also one of the most inscrutable. The retailer directly sells some books, while others are sold by third parties. The wild pricing happens with the latter. [...] Third-party sellers, Guru Hariharan, chief executive of Boomerang Commerce, said, come in all shapes and sizes -- from well-respected national brands that are trying to maintain some independence from Amazon to entrepreneurial individuals who use Amazon's marketplace as an arbitrage opportunity. These sellers list products they have access to, adjusting price and inventory to drive profits. Then there are the wild pricing specialists, who sell both new and secondhand copies.
"By making these books appear scarce, they are trying to justify the exorbitant price that they have set," said Mr. Hariharan, who led a team responsible for 15,000 online sellers when he worked at Amazon a decade ago. [...] A decade ago, Elisabeth Petry wrote a tribute to her mother, the renowned novelist Ann Petry. "At Home Inside," published by the University of Mississippi Press, is now out of print, but late last week secondhand copies were for sale on Amazon. A discarded library copy was $1,900. One seller offered two copies, each for $1,967, although only one was described as "Nice!" All these were a bargain compared with the copy that cost $2,464.
It's money laundering.
Pay lots of money for an item of very little value. Money becomes legit.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Exactly how many Amazon stories are going to get posted to Slashdot today?
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It could also just be a form of money laundering. Buy your own book for $2000. If you're at least a little savy, make it look like it's a "rare" book. Rinse, repeat.
This is likely a terrible way to launder money, and I suspect There's likely _much_ smarter ways to do this, but I'd suspect some form of fraud before I'd suspect trying to fool real people into spending that much for a paperback book published in 2009.
This looks like a creative re-telling of a story from ~6 years ago, which pleasantly linked to a good explanation of how algorithmic pricing leads to these oddities.
Seller 1 with a good quality book sets his algorithm to "15% more than lower quality used book"
Seller 2 with a average quality book sets his algorithm to "undercut better quality used book by 5%"
Then the price is updated every day for months .... been posed here before.
I buy a lot of stuff that is found out in the "long tail", obscure CDs or books that (a) not a lot of people might be interested in and (b) not a lot of copies were made in the first place. What I find is that sometimes these items go for very cheap (because not a lot of people are interested in it) or a whole lot (because there aren't a lot of copies in existence). So a copy of a Mickey Jupp CD, or an out of print 60's novel might go for 99 cents, or 50.00 dollars. I usually wait around, and the low price eventually pops up.
Chances are the person that bought the book is the same person that sold it.
Disappointing that the NYTimes writer - @DavidStreitfeld. - (wouldn't call him a "journalist") didn't think of that or research other reasons for the high price of the book before writing the article.
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All depends on the contents of the book; what is the insert and how many grams does it weight. In plain terms money transfers for selling illegal stuff.
Many times ive see. 1 item for $10 and a two-pack of the same item for $30. Amazon can have good orices but dont blindly order from them. Also the third party resellers do get contact information even when item is fullfilled by amazon
If you have stolen cash, laundering it starts with the cash.
If you are in possession of a stolen bank account, or stolen credit card number, you want to turn that credit card number into money. You can't necessarily go make a withdrawal from a bank account because they'll want to see ID, but you can use a bank account to pay for something online without ID.
I remember a few years back seeing an insane price and reporting it as an issue with the listing once.
Turns out, the seller claimed I shouldn't have seen it, and they set the price to $9999 to prevent sale while they are out of stock and the item is on the slow boat from china, or so they say.
"We see here you have a gross income of $88,704" ....
"Yea I sold 36 books on amazon..."
At least once a week I'll find an item that has a price way beyond any reasonable price. The last one was a pair of wire strippers listed for nearly $2000. I can't imagine that anybody ever buys those items for those prices, but ya never know!
It could be a strange money-laundering scheme or could be just greedy third party sellers. It's definitely something that Amazon needs to investigate.
When we sold books (we stopped 10 years ago, lots of reasons but mainly Amazon), we'd see prices on used books on sites such as the late Half.com and Amazon marketplace that would go from a $10 reasonable to $40-60 silly. What we were finding is that it was often the same book getting marked up by a couple bucks by each merchant who thought they could sell it, and still make money buying it off the other guy. We could trace one book through a half-dozen sellers by the text they'd add onto the descriptions
Design for Use, not Construction!
You'll also see this at mostly cash businesses, where they don't seem to actually have a lot of customers, but are just conduits for the drug trade and other ill gotten gains.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If only there were some kind of numerical indicator on this kind of thing that could be used to alert an amazon staffer to check it out.
Nullius in verba
Say, does anyone know if Jeff Bezos committed treason in the past few hours? Because if so, you'd think there would be a story about it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They are using Amazon to communicate clandestinely, obviously. The prices are code. Without the code book to decipher it, you have no hope of knowing what they are saying to each other, or to know who the sender or recipient are. Also, looking for used books on Amazon looks perfectly innocent.
An example message could be that there is a used copy of Wuthering Heights for 2901.08, meaning this: meet at the park and bring the diamonds, while a price of 2901.78 means: the director wants you to deposit the carcass with the bacterium from lab D into the reservoir on the 13th, after 8 pm. Or whatever. You get the idea.
Used to be they put cryptic ads in newspaper classifieds, now they can do this worldwide, not limited by newspaper circulation, and oh did I mention that doing it this way is free?
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Free shipping!
Having written integrations to Amazon to post items on behalf of 3rd parties, at the end of the day, you have to verify that everything is working in Production. To do that, you have to post a real item but you don't want anyone to accidentally buy it. A way to ensure that doesn't happen is to set the price to something absurd.
As someone else noted above, an algorithmic re-pricer could also be to blame in some cases.
So it's money laundering, eh ?
I'm going to have a little fun with these guys, and buy all their books MYSELF !
That'll show em !
There are numerous non-illegal reasons for the large price. Perhaps you have a new helper/employee who lists things and you want to review what they did before the item becomes active. One way to do that is to set a crazy high price so it's easy to tell which items you need to review. If the item gets by you and becomes active, the high price will prevent anyone from buying it in case part of the description or shipping policy is wrong. Though I think this applies more to places like eBay than Amazon, but I've never listed a unique item on Amazon so perhaps that works the same way.
Another possibility is the item is out of stock and instead of deactivating the listing they massively bumped the price. Sometimes that's easier and cheaper (fewer fees) than adding/removing listings.
And of course another possibility is a typo or software mistake. Many sellers use software to sell the same item on multiple platforms. That software could have parsed something wrong and screwed up. The chances of that increase if the software is set to automatically follow the average price of an item.
If artificial scarcity on a 9 year old book is Mr. Hariharan's only or primary explanation, he must have been a clueless manager.
This pricing thing stinks to high heavens as money laundering schema, especially considering mentioning of Russian inflow to the author's website.
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The more I know people, the more I love animals
I've been tempted to put my old chromebook on ebay for $2299 and label it "parts only" Really it is worth about $50, but the hassle of boxing it up and shipping it somewhere isn't worth it for about $200. The post office here really sucks, so an extra $2K for my pain and suffering would be nice.
Okay, next item? Next item we're gonna do is uh, 5 5 2 1 6 uh 7, 7 5, 5 [actually 55-26177] This is-oh my God, look at this you guys. This is 200 carat Brazilian emerald and plasticine ring. I'm gonna start bidding for this ring at, um, let's see, eight billion dollars. Eight billion dollars, opening bid. We've gotta sell this ring today. Tell you what, I'm gonna take it down a little. We're gonna drop that price down to... $75.95. At this price it's not gonna last for lo-oh, we got a caller...
Looking for explanations like "money laundering". This was mentioned in a forum on fountain pens. A common bottle of ink was marked at several hundred dollars. later it was marked back down. The simplest explanation is that it was simply a mistake. Much of the pricing like this is explained by this. The next simplest is that it is a common technique used by some retailers. If they run out of stock and have to delist an item then relist the item it costs them money. So they change the price to something ridiculuosly high when stock gets low and then drop the price when they replenish stock. Between these two explanations I think 99+% are explained byu these two.
Obvious. (And old news to boot.) What turnip truck did the NT Times "reporter" fall off of?
... check this out at Amazon
A Lady of Light Appears in Egypt: The Story of Zeitoun
Two of the authors are friends and colleagues of mine. They have nothing to do with the Amazon pricing of this self-published out of print book.
I don't know why people have to dream up all sorts of wild conspiracy theories when the most common explanation is actually MUCH simpler than even the "simpler" one. It's a FRICKING PLACEHOLDER and sellers have been doing that for years. Often they don't even have a single one of the item in stock, so they jack up the price so high that nobody would buy it, until they get stock again, then lower it back to normal.
There might be a few tiny corner cases of the more nefarious explanations, but I'd wager that probably in 99% of cases it's nothing like that at all. Few people are dumb enough to try to launder money in such an obvious fashion, in such a high profile place. You'd have to be a complete moron to do that. And as for creating an artificial scarcity by pricing your item high when others are selling the same thing cheap? That's even more idiotic. There are probably more cases of algorithmic pricing gone awry than either of those two things, but all three of those combined would still be nearly two orders of magnitude fewer instances than just using the listing as a placeholder.
That is almost _always_ the case. I'm equally disappointed in the so-could journalist who came up with this scarcity crap, and the Slashdot posters with their completely stupid conspiracy theories about money laundering and drug trafficking. Seriously? Has anyone even thought that through for more than 10ms? Nobody (or at least, very, very, very few) people are dumb enough to try that kind of nonsense on a site like Amazon.
... same way as in big MMO's.
Here is how it works:
- offer worthless items for ludirous prices, normal customers will not buy
- transfer currency (bt pref) to a only one time to use account and pay the ludicrous price, delete or abandon this account directly to minimize tracks
- withdraw the laundered money from your account
So you turn your blackmarket money into ligit cash.
How I know this: i play a variety of MMO's, and wondered why just like the author in the article, it just didn't add up so I had to look into it.
Bach says it all.
That only cost a few hundred new!
Can't find the link now. They were Beyerdynamic.
Of course it would be relatively easy for Amazon to crack down on this if they cared, but then they'd deprive themselves the revenues from these activities. I wouldn't be surprised that if like all things Amazon they'd devised a system which minimized the security required to meet their legal obligations and a fraudulent activity model designed to maximize the funds they seize from suspect accounts.
For some reason even before the trade tax things on amazon.ca are priced way higher than in the US, and not just because of exchange and shipping because it can be over double or quadruple the price on some items, if they're even available here at all
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