Nothing Like Holiday Price Gauging

I have noticed some terrible patterns on Amazon.com while shopping this holiday season lately and that is they allow their “affiliates” to greatly mark up product prices for sale when inventory is low and the products can’t be found elsewhere. For many products and this is especially true of Children’s toys you can find the Amazon.com price listed as 2-5x higher than the products retail value from the manufacturer or a competing site. Though the product is out of stock at the other stores, an Amazon.com store or subsidiary will have it in stock and sell it for these outrageous rates and prey upon people who are desperate to buy the product.

I expect to see this from eBay where people action and sell times for whatever they want, but this means that Amazon.com is no longer reliable for looking for the best prices on items and this only means that you have to check other sources first. It used to be that Amazon.com almost always carried the best prices on items and they still do on many items, but you just can’t trust their item prices anymore as a result of these recent trends. Amazon.com should deny partner companies from listing product prices higher than say 20% of the retail value of the product, they should do this to help cut down on price gauging.

-Justin Germino