... is that their prices fluctuate throughout the day! I thought it was interesting that my book's price had three different ones last week in its first week of release, but then I logged in this morning and found it was back at the pre-release price. HMMMmmmmm....
I googled why this was and found out Amazon does something akin to "reverse haggling." Different people see different prices even if they look at the same time. Though the prices overall fluctuate randomly, Amazon uses cookies to ensure that for the individual shopper, the price stays stable at the first price they saw for each item. They randomly vary prices, to find what is the highest price customers are prepared to pay before sales fall enough to cut into the extra income from that higher price. In other words, they are dynamically altering prices to maximise income, rather than sales.
Well, whatever it takes to sell books, I'm all for it!
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