PSA – Amazon’s new Typical Price may wreak havoc on some listings…
If you stumble upon this ANYCUBIC listing from browse, and click on one of these two options, you will most likely see a page with no price, and a small message saying that price is hidden because it’s higher than typical. This is a side-effect of the new Typical Price logic Amazon has been rolling out.
If you follow along on Discord, you have seen me talk about the Typical vs List price dozens of times by now. TLDR; List price is whatever seller decides it should be, Typical price is what people actually paid over the last 90 days.
ANYCUBIC is one of the sellers that’s going to get hit by this the hardest. They tend to futz around with prices, constantly rotating coupons and promos and Prime exclusives, etc. Their List price has been out of whack with what their stuff actually sells for for as far as i can remember, which usually leads to high (but completely bullshit) discounts on page.
Well… Amazon’s new Typical price logic pretty much kills that behavior. And it doesn’t just stop the high bullshit discount from appearing on page, it also kind of punishes (perhaps unfairly) the sellers that make price futzing a habit.
The links below are to some 3 packs of PLA for $27.99. $9.33/kg is not a bad price for decent plastic from a decent brand. It’s not #red-alert type of a deal, but it’s far from terrible. Most certainly not terrible enough where Amazon should hide the price for an item in an attempt to discourage people from buying it.
Again – Typical price is not what it was selling for the last 90 days, it’s the average price people actually paid for the item, and the average price in Amazon’s system is obviously much lower than this. Low enough where they feel that they should warn their customers to stay away.
This may end up being a bit unfair to some sellers. Think of how most of us buy stuff – we wait until it’s on sale. A generic roll of filament may have a selling price on page of $17.99 for months, and no one will buy a single one. It goes BOGO, or some 50% promo, and suddenly the entire stock goes poof in a day. That 50% off price is now the Typical price. When the seller attempts to raise the price back to normal, or even to something like $12.99, Amazon will see it as higher than Typical and hide the price.
This also may have a side-effect of discouraging sellers from dealing at all, outside of Amazon approved promotions like Lightning Deals (which do not count towards Typical price). Sellers may be hesitant to have deep drops, since they may get “punished” for it on the way back up.
This is all still new and very much in flux, so i expect things to smooth themselves out in time, but for now things with pricing are a bit of a mess. Let’s just hope they get it right, so they don’t de-incentivize the sellers from actually dealing 🙂
On the site end of things – i’m reworking Kraptomizer and Pussycat to account for all these changes. Speaking of Pussycat – it failed to run last night. Nothing to do with this, the third party api where i get this data was down for upgrades/maintenance, and is still not fully back yet. Should be back to normal for Saturday’s run.
Amazon.com
Amazon.com
