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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.
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.
Oh please, there's -JOIN AMAZON PRIME TODAY!- not that many Amazon stories right now.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
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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I dunno but I think it should be a prime number.
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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.
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!
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
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.
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 !