Amazon’s competitive price for one particular book was £6.50. A book that has been out-of-print for approaching 40 years and sells regularly elsewhere for 8 to 10 times that price (as mine did when Amazon deactivated it).

Why did they choose £6.50 as a competitive price? That was the published price… in 1981

I keep geeing these for a few products which are selling elsewhere (clearly fakes) at below UK wholesale price source is always Manchester based sellers, I just report them to the UK Distros and they disappear within a few days

Amazons competitive price is a joke, we have multiple issues all the time with it. they take online prices and set the “competitive price” but seem to forget sellers have to pay 15% + in fees to amazon so most of the time we cant get any where near “competitive” I really do not know who they have employed to work this stuff out.

we even sell on several asins that amazon does for example we sell scola modelling clay, cost price 1.40 ish and amazon had it listed as £1.89, we had it for 7.99 after we have paid VAT, Fees, Postage etc we make around 30p profit but obviously our offer was disabled as a pricing error by amazon and they do not even factor in that with amazon you have to pay for delivery or order £20 worth of items to get free delivery, I even tested a 2.99 price point to see what would happen and still a pricing error even though it costs that much just to post it

yes - rife within the current system

Totally flawed, we had an item that we were told had to be at 0.68 pence. For a laugh I tried to put it on Small and Light and was told the fee would be 2.98, so 2.98 just to fulfil the order, before that I have to buy the item, pack it, and send it to Amazon, and pay the VAT.

Maybe I am being thick, but really cannot see how I can sell it for 0.68 pence ?

With the cost of the item and all other factors taken into account we would have to sell for 7.96 just to break even, and that is without the Fraud allowance we have to add in these days thanks to the A-Z free product promotion that Amazon is currently offering.

I was reading something recently called American Innovation and Choice Online Act interesting read. The Act makes references to competing products etc and pricing.

Same here. We have had books deactivated where I had the one and only example listed on Amazon anywhere. So Amazon judge ‘competition’ where there is none… genius.

Create your own price rule that only compares prices on Amazon. Trying to reprice against the entire internet is impossible.

With books, there has been a disturbing trend of late where for an increasing number of rare, out-of-print items, Amazon is suddenly inventing a listing for themselves for a really low price but saying ‘Temporarily out of stock’. They then kick off all the higher priced copies of these rare books and the sellers end up with a violation for pricing.

Amazon is never going to have a copy back in stock for these books as they are out of print but it is effectively pinning the prices of these rare books to what they were when the books were newly published and plentiful. I know we can list as ‘collectible’ but if only takes one or two big sellers to fall in line with Amazon’s price diktat, and the market for that book is destroyed.

Why they do it is a mystery- Amazon misses out on the fees they would get if they allowed the market to find its own level.

Amazon is getting a joke. First of all it is free market, you can sell any price you like as long as there is a buyer. I know they introduce this beginning of Covid when there were some opportunist sellers selling PPE products at very very high prices and there were a public outcry about. Thats days has gone. When their bots detect a very low price they set it as competitive price and never change it. That particular price might be an error or a sale for a very limited time or because of over stock. So it may be impossible to sell at price for others. So the idea is foolish and execution is utterly non-sense. We also have few SKU’s blocked appearing on front page, they sell on Ebay and some other platforms very well.