The logical and commercially viable solution here is to lower the price when you buy a lot, because they want to maintain that customer loyalty if it means you're a good buyer. Same way it works with everything else... Buy 1, it's a given price; buy 100, it's a lot cheaper per unit.
That may not be true in this case. Amazon probably has a lot of information about the consumer that it can use to change pricing a number of ways. If Amazon thinks that the consumer will purchase a certain number of items no matter what the price is then they have every incentive to raise the price. I'm guessing they have a bunch of marketing people building models of consumer behavior based on any information they have about the consumer. Amazon will only offer bulk discounts if they know that a particular consumer will respond well to it. And if they do offer bulk discounts, they may offer the discount for a quantity slightly higher than the consumer wanted to entice them to buy more. Remember Amazon is interested in maximizing profits, not maximizing the number of items sold. I know it doesn't seem Amazon is interested in maximizing profits since they've never made any, but in the long run its the only viable solution. And programing a consumer model to change prices a little wouldn't be that difficult. A number of industries do it already.
I think this situation has a lot more to do with information about the consumers buying habits, price elasticity, etc than it does about price differentiation.
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Can't you read into the message? We don't want or need any more freeloaders of your kind!
What boat of free loaders did your parents, grand parents or great-grand parents come in on?
The logical and commercially viable solution here is to lower the price when you buy a lot, because they want to maintain that customer loyalty if it means you're a good buyer. Same way it works with everything else... Buy 1, it's a given price; buy 100, it's a lot cheaper per unit. That may not be true in this case. Amazon probably has a lot of information about the consumer that it can use to change pricing a number of ways. If Amazon thinks that the consumer will purchase a certain number of items no matter what the price is then they have every incentive to raise the price. I'm guessing they have a bunch of marketing people building models of consumer behavior based on any information they have about the consumer. Amazon will only offer bulk discounts if they know that a particular consumer will respond well to it. And if they do offer bulk discounts, they may offer the discount for a quantity slightly higher than the consumer wanted to entice them to buy more. Remember Amazon is interested in maximizing profits, not maximizing the number of items sold. I know it doesn't seem Amazon is interested in maximizing profits since they've never made any, but in the long run its the only viable solution. And programing a consumer model to change prices a little wouldn't be that difficult. A number of industries do it already. I think this situation has a lot more to do with information about the consumers buying habits, price elasticity, etc than it does about price differentiation.