Comparatitive Shopping, eBay Vs Amazon: Two Examples

There was time I knew Amazon to shop only for books. Not any more. There is a good option to shop around. Few things are cheaper on eBay and few on Amazon. Price is lower in Amazon (Merchant Sellers) purely due to its Price Parity Policy. We have got to do Comparative Shopping to save some money.

Here’s one example

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1. Price  eBay £185 vs Amazon £400
2. Used eBay vs New Amazon

 

The choice is yours, do you want to save £215 and buy one in perfect condition or buy from Amazon. I think this is where still Amazon lacks and eBay is the winner. You can get good bargains on eBay on used and collectible items which is non existent on Amazon.

Let’s look at another example

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Here, Seller’s price on Amazon is higher than eBay store which I was not expecting because their Amazon listings are against its Price Parity Policy i.e if you are selling same product at different places, your Amazon price should be same or lower. From a buyer’s perspective, you save bit of money simply by looking same store on different channel.

 All in all, remember to look for the product you like on more than one marketplace and save bit of money!

 

Amazon Price Parity Policy – Can you work around this ?

Image – Last Drop of Ink

I stumbled in an article on “Amazon Price Parity Policy”  by LastDropofInk this morning. It was a good read and recommend you to go through comments section. You will find real juice there !

I am not surprised most sellers are going on with what has been dictated by their Godly Amazon and why not? At the end of the day if no has done anything with their tax issue, I very much doubt anything will be done against this policy. At the end of the day, you would not want to get suspended from one of the most popular sales channel that is helping you to buy bread and butter. Would you?

Suddenly I got the feeling of “ DICTATORSHIP” here without any option than saying “YES SIR”.

I am aware that quite a few experts have given various options however; it is waste of time and a BIG RISK not following their policy. If they have spent time on finding out your price in other sales channel they will certainly find this and suspend you. Then what?

Simply, say “YES SIR” and change your prices. This is very simple do by uploading product inventory file. One thing you could try with few hundred products – Try hike postage price. We all know Amazon Customers are affluent and they don’t mind paying bit extra. Additionally, Amazon Checkout process is setup in such a way that it does not highlight the postage price that often unlike any other checkout process and they have got popular One Click Checkout technology which enable quick checkout taking postage price into consideration.  You can change shipping for your experimental product with “Shipping Overrides” file. See what happens and do the same for the rest. Good luck and please comment your result in this post.

Amazon got a good e-Commerce technology and you got low price products. These TWO gives you optimum shopping experience to the buyers. One thing definitely happens with Amazon’s Price Parity – Sales Growth.