We have been buying extra strong PG Tips British tea from Amazon because we think American tea is way too weak. 3 boxes of 80 were about $40 last time I bought them a few months ago. They’re now $80. Thankfully we discovered we can get an order of 6 for $60, but we have to wait until mid-February for the to arrive. Meanwhile, a single box of the same tea, which we’ll have to get in the mean time, is $20. Yes, a single box is less per box than a 3-count box order, but you still save if you buy 6 boxes. How does any of that make sense?
Get camel camel camel. It’s a price tracker browser extension. You can set alerts and stock up on stuff when you need.
Not sure about camelcamel, but I use Keeps and it has a price history chart so you can see the fluctuations of every product. They do go up and down like the stock market!
But more importantly, I set price alerts (same as camelcamel) and that really does make a massive difference. I’ve been doing it with grocery items lately, but even on high-value stuff that I’m willing to wait on can bring substantial savings.
It’s algorithmic to get you to pay more. The price will go up during high demand. Their “sales” are often more than the normal price. Then the price will go back down when demand falls. It works (for Amazon).
Amazons pricing scheme is a bunch of bait and switch and price gouging tactics.
I really wonder who is still buying things on amazon. I used it mainly to browse and then find the product somewhere else. But now it’s an absolute shitshow. Clothing is probably the worst, everything is cheap fast fashion directly from china and they usually have like a 3 star rating where people are either shills or people who complain that it’s worthless and the pictures look nothing like what it’s sold. Aside from wish level crap, the “normal” items don’t even seem to ve cheaper anymore than what it’s sold in a store.
Car parts. I can have a part in two days, it’s the same part that the parts store carries, but 1/4 the price. Fuck them parts stores.
Just yesterday I discovered the prices change depending on whether or not I’m logged in. Supposedly this only happens when there are multiple sellers and Amazon favors the ones that honor prime… but I could not find the lower priced seller anywhere when logged in. Now I’m wondering if prime actually increases shipping costs because vendors just raise their overall prices to cover it… very, very close to dropping prime this year.
They’re so insistent on getting people to do their Subscribe & Save stuff, with lots of discounts for making a subscription. And I take the discount and cancel the subscription as soon as it shows up. The entire point seems to be to get people to subscribe at the low price, and then jack the price up, sometimes double, when it starts recurring.
Is it sold by the same seller as last time? Lots of stuff on Amazon is actually sold by someone else and different sellers can have wildly different prices.
I have honestly never bothered looking at the seller. It’s just the same order I keep re-ordering. Or used to.
Yeah lots of “drop shipping” folks on Amazon, they buy a pallet of whatever it is from the same source as the top seller and then do some magic to get the “buy box” (the company that shows as default seller). Once they run that person out of business they are free to raise pricing until they no longer are winning the buy box again.
Amazon has also gotten bad with who it allows to sell on the site, and has been known to lump similar SKUs together, even ones from different sellers. This becomes especially troublesome when someone in the stack is selling counterfeit items.
All that is to say, pay attention to who you are buying from, and be on the lookout for counterfeit items.
EDIT - I don’t think this is the case here, but Amazon is also known to look at the users location and device and change prices accordingly. A great example of this is that sometimes a user buying from an Apple device (desktop or iPhone) will pay more than a user from a cheaper Android or Windows PC for the same item.
this thread makes me think we need a ‘help me find this’ kinda of community…
i remember a reddit sub helped me find a sweater i really wanted and had spent weeks searching for.
There actually is a HelpMeFind community (https://lemmy.ml/c/helpmefind), although it’s dead at the moment. I agree it’s be good to have it up and running.
I used to have a multi Reddit set up which grouped various subs all about helping people either identify things (songs/movies/books/random objects they’d found/etc), find them online to buy, or discover new related stuff (If I Like This), it was quite fun and obviously it helped people. Also meant I discovered a LOT of music that I really liked, but would probably never have heard of.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !helpmefind@lemmy.ml
!helpmefind@lemmy.ml There’s a booger link for those wanting to stay on their instance.
Oh man, speaking of sweaters, it’s hard as hell to find decent used men’s cashmere sweaters and even the cheaper new ones are $80-100. And that’s if you want one that’s a pattern-free one color boring sweater. I have like four nice looking cashmere sweaters with a sensible pattern on them that I’ve had since probably the early 2000s that I barely even wear anymore because I love them so much and I can’t find a decent replacement for them even the last time I looked on eBay (this may have changed, but I don’t have the money to spend right now). I guess I just have to wait for them to come back in style.
Do you have Nordstrom Rack near you? They often have new cashmere marked down to 20 or 30 bucks.
