this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
526 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
60349 readers
5913 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is still massive price manipulation on amazon which is why I don’t have a prime account for home or anything on “subscribe and save” any more.
"Subscribe and save" is a scam.
They advertise that you will save 5% by using subscribe and save, but then the price of the item you are buying just happens to go up by 30% on the day they decide to use as the basis for your order, which is not the day you ordered it or the day they pulled it off the shelf. It will occasionally go back down to a normal-ish price, but there will also be random months where it goes up 50% or 100%. I've seen $15 case of paper towels go up to $45 some months.
Then they keep prodding you to add more items to get 10% off your entire subscribe and save. I added some items a few weeks ago, got the extra discount percentage, but when they priced my order a few weeks later, the cat food I've been getting from them at a pretty stable price suddenly went up in price by the exact amount the extra discount was saving me.
Amazon essentially took the "four square" concept that car dealers use to shift higher costs to an area of the transaction where you are less likely to notice it.
The subscribe and save price reflects the listing price at the time your order is fulfilled.
As a seller, the number of subscriptions evaporates if I increase the price on an item.
What you are describing is not a tactic any business is intentionally employing. It's more likely born of incompetence.
That may be the case, but I have to admit, assuming malice is a lot more fun!