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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.
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.
That almost seems plausible.
Go to the physical used book store and find used books by the same author. List them on Amazon for the "secret goods" price, and make sure your market knows to look for books by the author you've chosen. "This week's author is Frank Wordsworthy".
Ordinary buyers won't bother with "mispriced" books, but the ones that do buy know they're getting more than the book.
Why bother with bitcoin and the dark web when you can just bury your sales on Amazon.
The grocery store turns cash into Amazon gift cards pretty easily.
Another thing at least on Ebay is apparently avoiding relisting fees (and losing potential buyers having earmarked an article number) when you temporarily have just few items in stock: you just mark them up from $2 to $102 and will be able to still deliver on the few accidental orders that still get through (like by people who had earmarked an item and at some point of time order without checking for price changes).
That raises your profile.
eBay has policies about refunds and the fees associated with them as do other sites. Do it too often and your account is flagged for investigation and/or cancelled.
Having a history of 'no item / bad inventory' interactions with legit buyers makes plausible deniability harder to maintain.
With all that said, the ridiculously overpriced items are easy to spot and may be amateurs or people going for a short run of 'sales'. It would be harder to spot those who do as you suggest - pricing items at the top of the price envelope to reduce real buyers, but not so much as to attract attention like these do. Maybe you'd have the odd legit sale you'd have to decline, but on the whole, I imaging that this would prove more stable in the long run.
Now I almost want to buy one of these to see what shows up. :)