Second-Hand Book Prices On Amazon

trisontana

I have just logged on to Amazon intending to sell my copy of the Thomas Cook guide to Vilnius . I bought my copy a few months ago for about £2.00 . Imagine my surprise to see various dealers are asking from £48 to well over £100 for the same book. Why these ridiculous high prices for what is a small paperback guide book?

Even more surprising one company was asking nearly £3,000 for a similar book on Porto. Are they seriously imagining that somebody would pay these prices for these books? What's going on?

Paully232000

It is the same on a lot of marketplaces. I often buy second hand computer games and the prices some people mark them up at makes me wonder why they even bothered to write the listing. I have seen a game at a reasonable £15-£25 listed at £100s by some.

paddyrg

They probably pay per listing, but can change the price for free. Maybe they sold their copy, so rather than cancel a listing and lose the listing fee, they put a silly price on it until they get another copy. If someone buys it, they know they've got enough money to buy a copy from a competitor and have it sent to you and still be in profit.

artbaron

The Amazon marketplace prices are often insane. I've seen books costing £25 listed at £20,000. And it's not just books. Yesterday I was browsing shower gels (of all things) and some of the £2.95 stuff I sometimes buy was listed in the marketplace at £16.95 and £39.95 + £11.02 delivery! Where do they get these prices from?

In fact, if you look at the marketplace prices for most products you'll see some of them are so outrageous it's difficult to know how they expect to make a sale.

bod1467

I suspect paddyrg has hit the nail on the head.

trisontana

I have received a reply from one of the sellers. They said that they had priced the book at £48 as other people were selling it for over a £100. Regarding listing fees, I cannot speak for large companies, but for individuals like me I don't have to pay an initial fee. Amazon just take a small cut when the item is sold.

Steer73

I have not used Amazon Marketpklace for ages, but you used to be able to list stuff on there for free, so it did not matter whether it sold or not.

trisontana

Steer73 wrote: »

I have not used Amazon Marketpklace for ages, but you used to be able to list stuff on there for free, so it did not matter whether it sold or not.

Exactly. OK it saves them having to re-list the book, but that's just a two minute job.

Apollonia

trisontana wrote: »

Even more surprising one company was asking nearly £3,000 for a similar book on Porto. Are they seriously imagining that somebody would pay these prices for these books? What's going on?

Automatic pricing algorithms. It's been happening for a while on amazon and this blog post from 2011 explains it:

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

For those who don't want to click to the blog page, here is the bare bones of the explanation:

Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook’s price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook “noticed” profnath’s change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath’s higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week.

Amazon retailers are increasingly using algorithmic pricing (something Amazon itself does on a large scale), with a number of companies offering pricing algorithms/services to retailers. Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced.
Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook’s price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook “noticed” profnath’s change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath’s higher price. - See more at: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358#sthash.NlzWI0MS.dpuf

Paully232000

Interesting blog, thanks