I bought a barber clipper/trimmer a few years ago from Atlanta Barber Supply (shout), a real company that sells genuine merchandise, because they had the best price on the entire internet for this limited edition piece I wanted. I checked Scamazon who did not have an amazing price, and to my not_surprise a significant number of the reviews were negative claiming that the item they received had human hairs in the blades and motor. That’s fucking disgusting. I don’t mean the hair, either. I’m talking about the audacity. The fact that a small company in Atlanta can significantly outprice the scamlords selling used junk with greasy old man pubes does not bode well for this Buy Box 2.0 thing they’re running. And yet people want to rearrange the entire internet pricing landscape at the whim of these cockroaches.
For whatever reason in my mind I thought Ebay was the notable scammy site but I’m right now exploring and it’s wild.
AKGs never break. Their detachable cords break if you breathe on them and that’s how AKG makes the real money, but the actual headphones never break.
Grunching, but this doesn’t seem like an issue of transparency or itemized pricing, but rather one of lying. It’s not free shipping if the shipping is just rolled into an increased unit price. To me it seems wrong to tell the world they are getting free shipping when really you are charging for the shipping and just forcing everyone else on the internet to raise their prices, too.
[quote=“Lawnmower_Man, post:64, topic:5099”]The reason you need to eat shit and pay the sucker price is because you are the sucker.
[/quote]
The best product I ever received from Scamazon was an adult medium t-shirt that arrived 3 or 4 months later and was clearly printed on a home printer because I could see the jpeg compression artifacts where the idiot tried to enlarge it. The shirt might have been big enough to fit a ten-year-old child. I’m not even sure how this happened, but I think it was an item I had in my cart from a legit seller that went out of stock, and so this scammer swooped in and claimed to “have” it and I didn’t notice it. But yeah let’s raise retail prices globally for this shit.
Story checks out. Shoulda gone Fulfilled By Amazon!
This whole issue only exists when a seller wants to charge more on Amazon than they do elsewhere. If that doesn’t actually happen, what are we even talking about? If it does happen, then it certainly seems bad for people who buy a lot of stuff on Amazon.
Hmm what am I looking at? Bear in mind last night might literally be the first time I really explored amazon dot com.
Amazon is selling those headphones as a retailer for $350, rather than just brokering a deal for headphones between you and reallylegitheadphonesguy69. Which means it’s significantly less likely to be a scam than buying from ableseller.
Yes, make sure you read the final checkout page very carefully since they might switch the seller to a scammer after the item is in your cart. That sounds like a great online shopping feature that I’d definitely pay a premium for.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/changing-sellers-in-your-amazon-cart/105468/3
Of course it isn’t. You don’t get free shipping ever, for anything. You pay for every single part of the logistics chain for every single item you buy, online, in-store, and everywhere else. If there’s a lie it’s when an item has shipping and handling costs above the listed price, because that means you can’t actually own it for the amount it’s advertised at.
Wow. Good thread.
Saying there is free shipping when the cost of shipping is built into the price is a lie, though. I don’t know why you are doing all this hand waving that effectively carries water for pretty simple, blatant deception.
Supermarkets offer “free” parking. Are they deceptive?
OK sure, it’s more technically accurate to say “shipping included”, but everybody does this and it predates Amazon. This isn’t a trick Bezos invented. It’s something that has been very common forever, because people are stupid and they respond to dumb gimmicks that are transparent if you spend even a moment thinking about them.
Most of my ebay listings say “Free shipping” in bold, red text. Not my choice, it’s just what happens when I include the shipping cost in the sales price. And it works. If I have identical listings, one of them $6 with $3.49 shipping, and the other is $9.95 with free shipping, the more expensive one will sell first just because shipping is “free”.
It’s kind of depressing how much we’ve let the basic meaning of words get devalued by cynical advertising. Like, people rightly hate lawyers for being deceptive with language, but IMO they have nothing on ad agencies. Telling you something is free implies that the company is eating the cost of it, they are providing you some extra value over their competitors. I’d be surprised if more than 10% of people using Amazon Prime read “free shipping” to mean that the price of shipping is simply rolled up into one increased price for convenience sake. It’s just deceptive and manipulative on a very basic level. Is it the biggest offense that we should be concerned about? Certainly not, but we shouldn’t just accept and defend the practice, either.
Fair enough, the point I realized I was getting at after we began this back and forth is not necessarily that Amazon is a unique offender, it’s more just frustration that so many people are just perfectly fine with blatant manipulation.
The people being manipulated expect sellers to eat the cost of shipping, so I don’t really care. Just because you own a business doesn’t mean you’re Scrooge McDuck rolling around in gold coins. It can be very difficult to make even a modest living if you’re a small business. If I relied on my customers to pay me what they thought was fair I’d be working for about $2 an hour. Buying and selling is an inherently adversarial relationship.
We’re definitely all guilty and we’re all susceptible. Almost every time I go to the supermarket I’ll see something I usually buy for maybe $1.79 and it’s on sale with a sign saying 3 for $3.99, and I think, “Who do they think they’re fooling with with volume pricing nonsense? The sale price is $1.33 each.” Then I put 3 in my cart.
If you want to end this conversation, there are ways to do so without saying I’m stupid or dishonest.