Amazon gives non-Prime members free shipping at $35 or more of eligible items. Instead of simply letting users get the product with free shipping, they’ve added a discount that prices it exactly one cent below the $35 limit, while only subsidizing the price with $3.38, which is about half of what they’ll then charge you for shipping.
You could buy something cheap like soap But don’t they do free shipping if total order is above the limit ?
cheap like soap
Soap in the supermarket €1, same soap on Amashit €3.99 with free delivery
How can big A even give an account to a third-party product? It’s not their deal.
Assuming you mean discount, they pay the third party the agreed value, and give the discount from their percentage.
Let’s say the third party lists it for $35.50
Amazon applies a discount of $0.51 cents to bring it under the $35 amount for free shipping.
Someone buys it for/that $34.99 but Amazon still pays the original seller based on the seller’s original listed price.
And so Amazon subsidised it, but still came out net benefit because the amount of the subsidy was less than shipping cost, or less than the price of some other item the customer now had to put in their basket to get over the free shipping threshold again.
If the seller is an affiliate that’s covered in their contract. The seller won’t see a loss in profit, but Amazon will rake in a few dollars for shipping fees.
I wanted to order something, but half a year of waiting seemed like a bit long. Refunded, got money back and ordered again. I still have half a year to wait, but I have mine money too. profit?
What annoys me is the price fixing
Temu or aliexpress
Those a worse
I rather have price fixing than slavery
But Amazon just resells from the same places So u get both - slavery. And funding Jeff bezos.
Amazon can not legally use slavery. The Chinese government on the other hand is a totally different beast.
Amazon does not care. Never have.
They force people to pee in the bottles, watch eye movement with cameras and support Trump.
Everything sold on Amazon is from china
I bet this thing was actually worth only $25.
The markups have become insane on Amazon.
I remember when Amazon first started there were good deals on good quality items. Then as they secured a dominating position on the market prices started going up but at least the low quality junk items were relatively rare and easy to identify so it was worth a little premium. Then they got rid of that and now it’s almost all overpriced junk items sold by shady sellers now.
I almost never use Amazon now unless it’s for something specific that I can’t find anywhere else.
The amount of small items that should only be a couple of bucks selling for $10 or more on Amazon is insane
They inflate price to offset shipping costs for prime members. This hits cheaper items harder. They used to have add-on items to get around this but I haven’t seen that in a while.
IFixit is generally good quality/value in my experience if it’s actually them and not some knockoff/drop shipper. Granted haven’t had a need to buy anything of theirs for years because the one I have keeps being great.
That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.
That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.
No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.
The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.
I remember when Amazon first started there were good deals on good quality items
I remember when the primary use of amazon was buying secondhand items. The deals on used discs for PS2 or gamecube were amazing. It was ebay without bidding.
I remember when you pretty much only used Amazon to buy books
In this case, it’s 39.95 retail price. but I bet a lot of these things aren’t priced right
For an academic text on this subject with footnotes, I recommend Chokepoint Capitalism (2022) by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. It calls what you describe “moat buulding” and an “anti-competitive flywheel”.
I am confused by this thread, do you only have Amazon and eBay in US?
weird place to cast shade
It’s not shade. Consume from a more ethical company.
Eating ass is the only ethical consumption under capitalism
Wrong. It’s also morally correct to eat the rich. 🥰
Like…?
One that doesn’t fund Nazis?
I’ve learned about this in church. The bible calls that a “cunt”, from “the book of dick moves”.
Why would you order from amazon instead of directly from ifixit?
Because you already have an account set up with amazon.
Because you’ve used amazon before and feel comfortable with them.
I mean those are legitimate answers, but people around these parts don’t take kindly to primers
They gave me free prime. I was a god for 30 days. But ya.
Its just not a business I would recommend giving your money too, but its your choice.
As another user replied to you earlier, yeah, it’s substantially more expensive after shipping. Nearly 50% more, in fact, but in this specific instance I wasn’t actually planning on buying this specific bit set, the price and subsequent notice of the discount just caught my eye when it was in Amazon’s list of product recommendations.
Oh that makes sense, fair enough. I didnt know amazon did this but I stopped using them a while ago so haven’t kept up.
I think its becoming more and more common knowledge that amazon isn’t cheap anymore.
The same thing is $50 there with shipping.
Yeah but then ifixit gets the money instead, and amazon gets nothing. I want to pay ifixit for their stuff, not amazon. Amazon didnt do anything to deserve money from that purchase.
There are a lot of vendors who only sell through amazon though. That seems more like they are explicitly saying they prefer the amazon shop but I could be interpreting that wrong.
Most likely because they don’t wanna deal with shipping stuff
lmao jesus
People didn’t know this? I mean Amazon is evil shit. But companies have been doing stuff like this for 30 years…
I’d just never seen this specific flavor of bullshittery from them before. Encouraging sellers to keep prices below the shipping limit is one thing, but adding discounts artificially no matter what the actual seller prices their product at is a whole new level of making things worse for everyone involved.
Sellers have a lower likelihood of a non-Prime member buying their item, users don’t get free shipping.
They likely have an algo running to do this just like how they offer random coupons to entice you to buy items in your cart, and all the other tricks around shipping manipulation.
its a strategy, theyre not even being deceitful here, just pricing to their interests. theres so much evil stuff they do, but this example isn’t properly evil.
No, this is just an example of a lesser evil that we’ve grown accustomed to.
You used to be able to buy digital Amazon gift cards for a dollar. You would use the credit on your next purchase anyway. But they’ve raised the minimum to $5.
Can’t say I find this surprising, especially not coming from a #GAMAM. (Formerly #GAFAM)
wouldn’t it be AAMAM because Alphabet?
I say we keep the word we know
Except all of Alphabet entreprises have a name starting by Google. (Or at least strongly evocating it, in the case of Gmail.)
We can’t say the same about Meta. Instagram isn’t called “Facebook Gallery”, and Threads isn’t called “Facebook Short Messages”. (And Oculus didn’t become “Facebook VR”, just Meta.)
No, those are Google products, Alphabet is Google’s parent company and also holds many other companies like Waze and Doubleclick.
Except the team behind Waze was merged with the one behind Google Maps, they just keep the two apps separated (for now) to prevent any backlash. Same with Doubleclick and Google Adds. (In fact, I’ve got the impression Doubleclick became nothing more than an alias for Google Adds. And for quite some time, I might add.)
In my day it was FAANG
That is a far more funny acronym. Especially for a Frenchy like me, since my peoples often say of the ones controlling such big corporations, “they have fangs so long, they scratch the floor”. (Well… “They scratch the parquet”, to be exact. But who care if the floor is made of wood or not at that point.)
temu/aliexpress - same product and you are skipping jeff bezos pockets
Or just avoid buying from megacorpos directly.
good luck for niche items
Avoid doesn’t mean “totally abstain”, it means do your best to stay away.
Or even common ones that aren’t the biggest sellers.
It’s getting increasingly hard to find things locally, and frequently I’m left ordering things online after going to 3 different stores in town trying to find something specific. More than once it’s been a replacement or a refill of something I bought locally a few years ago.
It’s not a matter of “oh well Menards has the screws the right size but they’re Phillips drive.” It’s “this size is only available online, if you order from us it’ll take 6 days or more. Might still be Phillips idk.” And Amazon can get me what I need tomorrow.
Sometimes the local prices are insane too.
I needed a new infrared thermometer the other day; cheapest one I could find locally that wasn’t a kids medical forehead thermometer with a tiny temperature range: $56 before tax.
Amazon shipped one for $25 incl tax+shipping.
I’m broke af atm. That makes a huge difference. I feel dirty even opening the app/site; but that price difference is absurd.
I’ve actually added very low cost items to my cart, made sure free returns from Amazon only, and returned it. Two can play that game Amazon!
When I did this (I actually ended up not needing the item), they refunded the item minus the shipping cost, so…
If you return ‘too many’ items they may suspend or even ban your account. I’m not sure what the threshold is.
