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.
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.
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”.
In this case, it’s 39.95 retail price. but I bet a lot of these things aren’t priced right
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
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.
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.