When I started working on https://trackif.com, I thought the premise was thin because prices couldn't fluctuate that much. I assumed everything gradually declined in price, and that it'd primarily be driven by store-A vs store-B price dropping.
Nope. Retailers are just gaming us 24/7. I've become very aware of all the different timeframes retailers offer post-purchase price-matches (published at http://blog.trackif.com/trackif-smart-shopping-guide-store-p... since I felt like I was hoarding knowledge.)
Have retailers always played games like this? Or it just a side-effect of sales moving online?
I can speak to 25 years ago: the answer is yes. Here are some of the things I saw:
* Marking items up 30-45 days ahead of a big sale. This allowed our price to be 25% off instead of 10%. Or sometimes, our sale price probably should have been the regular price. This happened all the time, and people fell for it hard. Usually this would happen before a 10% off everything sale.
* Price adjustments from competitive shops. All of a sudden on some non-advertised sale day the laser printer would spit out a new low every day price if a strategic product was priced above the competition.
* Some price adjustments occurred to game the competition. We did this a lot with appliances where we'd mark up a model we knew the manufacturer had a ton of inventory. The competition would buy a few truckloads and then we'd run $200 off when they ran their $100 off add.
The only thing the internet has changed is the speed price changes occur and has enabled some other kinds of buy this get that deals.
In the furniture biz, lots of places have laws restricting how many days/year a given shop can do "going out of business"/"total clearance" sales. Otherwise, they tend to run them non-stop for decades because they are so effective at bringing in customers.
According to my friends that have worked furniture retail, it was common practice to mark everything up 300% for a week then have a "40-60% Off!!!" sale. Customers would be very excited about how much money they were "saving" even though the reality was that they were buying at a net markup compared to a few weeks ago. But, a few weeks ago the shop was much, much quieter even though the prices were lower. So, what's a shopkeeper to do?
In Europe, there are rules about sale pricing for all items, they have to be at the original price for a certain period. They still manage to game it a bit, but slightly less so, eg some items are normally overpriced etc.
What I have noticed recently in UK TV adverts is that £xxx off special offer and then put an on-screen rider "discount on 'after offer' price".
So they pitch it like a sale but really they will just offer whatever is left of their product at a higher price for a while in some store or maybe just online.
Also offers have to be changed every 3 months in the UK, otherwise it is no longer considered an offer/bonus but the standard price and has to be advertised as such.
There is a furniture store near where I live that was going out of business for 10 years. My wife and I always joked that they should have a "Proudly going out of business for 10 years" sign.
They finally went out of business last year. The business that replaced them was another furniture store which happened to be owned by the same people the owned the first. What gives with that anyways, is that some sort of tax gaming?
Some street vendors in downtown Washington, DC, used to have a sign over their table "Going Out For Business Sale". Whether they were hoping to lure the inattentive, amuse the alert, or both, I don't know.
Thirty years ago the atterney general for Maryland, Steve Sachs, hassled a couple of the big local department stores into agreements restricting this sort of behavior.
In running PricePlow (https://www.priceplow.com), I can say that our products (vitamins / supplements / protein) are complete and total chaos on Amazon. They clearly don't care about this corner of the market and let the marketplace stores run wild.
Despite some of the monumental volume that some of these products have, their listings are nothing short of unorganized disaster. There are definitely places where Amazon could (and should) have better pricing, but is actively neglecting it - and so are the marketplace stores for various reasons.
But that said, over the past half dozen plus years of doing this, there's been a huge, distinct shift towards deeper trust in Amazon.
In some of our smaller PricePlow-driven sites, when in doubt with where to send traffic (like if a product is out of stock or the price is a tie), I used to send them to Bodybuilding. Now, that's no more - the demographic is still cautious, but far more friendly to buying on Amazon... mostly for the reasons stated here in this discussion.
A lot of the industry hasn't figured that out yet, so it's been an interesting transition.
End of the day, from what I've seen, Amazon is a mess and could be doing a lot better with certain segments, but still does well despite their worst efforts. They're heading towards unstoppable status.
I have the same question as DiabloD3, and I presume others do as well. Your desire not to hijack is honorable, but private email doesn't scale that well. I fear I'd be wasting your time to engage you directly. Perhaps you could write a short blog post and post it to HN for discussion? Or a Show HN? Or you could just answer here, toning done the marketing as much as possible.
Interested if you get more profit from demanding sign-in before you'll let people follow your Amazon links. Have you tried just using referrer links - presumably you do it this way on the basis that long term association gains enough to let one-time users abandon and skip direct to the site for purchase??
Interesting site, would definitely try it if there were a localised version for UK, anyone know of something similar for UK sites??
* The "sign-in before you'll let people follow" is just a straight forward result of A/B testing. It was like a 9-to-1 difference for single site returns. And despite the developer in me saying "gross", it was just a stat from our metrics guy that we couldn't refute.
* We're in Minnesota and Amazon's been playing games with our affiliate revenue to encourage some legislative changes... But even if the affiliate revenue was working perfect, it wouldn't be enough to keep the lights on. TrackIf is really just a platform to demonstrate our business solution (like how Home Depot does back-in-stock notifications)
* What's a UK based site you want tracked? I could wire it up for you.
* Amazon does all sorts of price games, geography/time-on-site
/Prime-status/etc.
I don't, yet, trust you. What are you doing to provide some confidence that my name & amazon wish list won't be sold...
I use a similar site for building computers.
www.pcpartpicker.com and I love these guys. I use to go straight to NewEgg but after finding pcpartpicker, I now go there first. I'm not sure how they monetize the site but they won me over by not requiring me to sign up.
I'm too lazy to create a one off email address just to see if the site is worth it or not.
Also, I couldn't tell from your site if it's possible to enter a SKU and have the site notify me of where I could purchase it and what price history there was on it which I think would be awfully cool.
As an example, I really want to purchase a festool router but these are considered the best-of-the-best and their price reflects this and so in a manual way, I've been watching their prices on a couple web sites for sales.
Love the concept and everything else about the idea!
Another idea is if you can find users who all want to buy the same thing and see if you can leverage this to get volume discounts. I recently been playing with a site called massdrop that attempts to pull this off.
Works for Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, US. Historical price information anything where someone's looked them up at least once - which basically means everything, except super-super-tail items.
It's pretty amusing to see how much the price fluctuates over time - probably tracking other stores' special deals and so on.
I mostly use it to buy games: set a price track alert when they come out, tell the site to email me when they hit £20 a year or two later.
Nope. Retailers are just gaming us 24/7. I've become very aware of all the different timeframes retailers offer post-purchase price-matches (published at http://blog.trackif.com/trackif-smart-shopping-guide-store-p... since I felt like I was hoarding knowledge.)
Have retailers always played games like this? Or it just a side-effect of sales moving online?