Amazon charged some customers more than others for the same item

In today’s Times, we learn that Amazon is raising and lowering the prices of items millions of times a day. We also learn that it has displayed different prices for the same item based on who you are. Imagine going in to a store and the paper towels are $3 for the person next to you but $4 for you. 

I can attest to Amazon changing prices multiple times a day because Amazon crawls my retailers’ websites multiple times a day.  It’s as if they have spies coming in our front doors, writing down prices, and leaving. Then doing that 1,000 times per day.  We don’t take up its bandwidth and spy on it—I wish it would stop doing that to our indie, Main Street stores. When Amazon crawls our sites, it takes up resources and may cause a delay in real customers getting their pages to load quickly. If tons of Amazon spy visitors come at once, it may even prevent a real customer from accessing a retailer’s site. It thereby not only steals our pricing data but also literally disrupts a purchase.  

Amazon won’t stop crawling our sites should ask it to.  There is no way to opt out. Why can’t I just block any Amazon related traffic? Because many legit services, including email servers, are hosted with Amazon.  If we block Amazon, we may block a client from sending or receiving email.  I’ve tried it and that’s what happens.  Amazon has mixed it’s legit and illegitimate businesses on the same hosting machines—making it difficult to stamp out. 

Read the full article at the NYT: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/technology/amazon-price-swings-shopping.html

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