First increase the price and then discount it. Americans found that the price during the PD period is higher than usual

Every year during Prime Day, experts warn consumers to be careful of various phishing emails and scams. However, more and more consumers now say that the real scams are actually hidden on the platform.

Many times, the various 50% and 60% off labels in the discount area often dazzle consumers. However, after careful identification, it is found that this is not the case at all.

After seeing all kinds of "amazing" discounts, consumers are gradually becoming sober. On social media, they have posted their own discount "scams".

One netizen posted a post complaining that he had purchased a round stool worth $69 before the PD event, thinking that he would buy it when the promotion was on. Unexpectedly, the price of this product suddenly increased before the event, and then quickly discounted by 30% to participate in the PD event. After all the operations, the price did not change at all.

This post quickly became popular after it was published, and many netizens said that they had similar experiences during the PD. Someone left a message saying that he purchased a product worth $1,300 last week, but the price increased to $1,400 two days before the PD, which was a bit exaggerated.

Some netizens also found something strange on the checkout page: the picture below shows a grinder worth 42.95 pounds, which is 28.49 pounds after the discount. But on the checkout page, the netizen was surprised to find that the actual original price of this grinder was 30 pounds, which means it was only a little cheaper.

What's worse, some people found that the price of the same product they bought before was even cheaper than after the Prime Day discount, which is simply outrageous.

In response to this issue, some media took these screenshots and submitted them to Amazon officials, hoping to get a reasonable explanation. An Amazon spokesperson said: "We are working hard to provide customers with clear and accurate pricing information on our product pages. We think this is meaningful to customers and it clearly shows the price of the product and the discount the customer enjoys."

On Amazon, sellers can set their own prices, and experienced sellers will find that consumers like to buy discounted products, or products that appear to be discounted. Amazon even has a special traffic zone for discounted products, and sellers will naturally not miss such an opportunity.

In fact, this phenomenon is not new. There is a paper analyzing this phenomenon earlier. In this paper, researchers said that Amazon's discounts are often disguised.

They studied the prices of about 15,000 products, ranging from cameras to blenders to drones, and found that the practice of increasing prices and then discounting them was so common that they named it "markup and list price synchronization."

In fact, this phenomenon is quite common in China, which has led to more and more people losing interest in big promotions such as Double Eleven and 618. However, the sales volume of PD this year has increased compared with previous years, and I hope this trend will continue in the future.

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PD

Discount scam