Amz purchases on $70-100 items showing up as 0.01???

Nat

Nat

Joined
Nov 18, 2014
Messages
555
Likes
345
Degree
2
Just checked my Amz aff account.... The items circled are $70-100.... never seen this before. There is no way that is a coupon... What is this sorcery?

todays_order.jpg
 
One possibility: Some third party vendor offered used items for $0.01. Either to build up review history, or to dispose unwanted items.
 
builder said:
One possibility: Some third party vendor offered used items for $0.01. Either to build up review history, or to dispose unwanted items.
Click to expand...

That would have been visible to me though, right? I sifted through every 3rd party seller... they may have wanted review history, but there is absolutely no way it was about dispose unwanted items. In fact, selling this item at a lower then normal price isn't even a smart move... So, it must have been a 3rd party with a secret coupon code? I don't understand how so many people found out about it
 
Nat said:
That would have been visible to me though, right? I sifted through every 3rd party seller... they may have wanted review history, but there is absolutely no way it was about dispose unwanted items. In fact, selling this item at a lower then normal price isn't even a smart move... So, it must have been a 3rd party with a secret coupon code? I don't understand how so many people found out about it
Click to expand...

Why is selling this particular item below normal price not a smart move? Is there Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) with this product?

I agree with others that it's likely a promotional code created by the seller to help gain reviews.
 
backwoods said:
Why is selling this particular item below normal price not a smart move? Is there Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) with this product?

I agree with others that it's likely a promotional code created by the seller to help gain reviews.
Click to expand...

There isn't a MAP that I know of. This product is frequently out of stock. We're talking, one of the top items on Amz. Its not an unwanted item to get rid of, so that means maybe they're looking for reviews? Okay, maybe. But, listing at 50% off would probably wipe a private seller's inventory within hours. Much less listing at 99% off. There are only a few other sellers, all playing the jacked up shipping game.

Something just seems way off with this. My initial thought was that 3rd party seller had a test coupon for 99% that someone found out about and abused. But, in this case, there is no reason not to have ordered tons of them. And, because quite a few people paid this price, it couldn't have been a private exploit because they wouldn't have been filtered through my link.

I mostly just didn't want to be indirectly associated with anything sketchy.

Only other idea -- if you buy from Amz and it goes out of stock and they can't send you the product, do they ever give account credit for the item?
 
As a seller on Amazon, you are given 5 different promo options:


Free Shipping
Offer free shipping on your entire catalog or a subset of your catalog.

Money Off
Offer a percentage discount on your entire catalog or a subset of your catalog.

Giveaway
Offer your items for free as part of sweepstakes to generate buzz around products and increase social media following.

Buy One Get One
Offer one or more items for free on a qualifying purchase from your entire catalog or a subset of your catalog.

External Benefits
Offer a post-order benefit on qualifying purchases from your entire catalog or a subset of your catalog.

These .01c orders could be a result of one of the last 2 options and may not be visible to you unless you ordered depending on how the seller created the campaign.

Also, coupons can be created to be unique (only used once per order), limited in quantity, etc.

It's highly unlikely anything sketchy is going on. The seller is probably just trying to improve their Amazon rankings... PPC costs are expensive!
 
I've been paying attention to discounts ever since this happened and doing some research plus asking around...

Without a doubt, I think there is semi-regular fraud happening on one of the products I was promoting. Maybe this is super common on popular items, maybe not.

This is what I've seen happen. Someone purchases an aged Amazon account, 5-10+ years old with positive feedback. Seller quickly adds lots of best-selling products to the account. You're selling used books back in 2010, you take a break for 7 years, and then you go from 0-hero? Item collections don't make sense, they're eclectic. Every single item in the seller's "store" is discounted below the lowest rate by a lot.
Lots of the discounted items are products that are already discounted a lot. One was a 50% off Amazon sale, and this seller is at 33% below Amazon? No way. No matter how badly you want Amazon feedback and sales, you don't list 80 random brand new products out of the blue, all at 40-70+% off MSRP.

It's not hard to crowdsource and find people who have fallen into one of these traps. The 3rd party seller will send a shipment notification a month later saying the item shipped. Then, after a span of time, the seller is notified the item was accidentally shipped to a different state. Of course, Amazon will refund the buyer for this. Pretty annoying for them since they waited a long time. I believe the seller keeps the initial payment until Amazon decides to go after them. I imagine it's just hit and run style for the seller.
 
Actually, AMZ has tightened up their review / ratings guidelines, making it so that a reviewer has to have bought the item.

This could be a way to get those accounts and items reviewable.

The sales numbers also look like that
You said those are "top items", so if the reduced price was up for any length of time, more than 1 - 4 would be bought.

This looks very much like
"OK, I'll set the price to $.01 now"
"Click, bought"
"Ok, reverting the price to normal"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back