price gouging on amazon?

[pinkytoe]

Not just a little, but a lot on all kinds of items. I assume that like much of their stuff, it is from third party Chinese vendors and much of it is counterfeit. I have switched my non-food online buying to Target with hopes that there is less of that. One would have to be really desperate for a product to pay the prices I am seeing on amazon.

[SteveinMN]

One would have to be really desperate for a product to pay the prices I am seeing on amazon.
Unfortunately, that's been a long-time "thing" with Amazon. The barriers to become a seller and post items for sale are so low that it's almost unavoidable that there will be abuse like that. It's happened in the past for discontinued or hard-to-find items like discontinued or popular game consoles, "it" toys at Christmas time, etc. So Amazon plays digital whack-a-mole and deletes the products and sometimes the accounts of the sellers. But they pop right back up again. ebay has a similar problem (and similar response).

However, just because someone prices a product at eye-watering levels doesn't mean they get it. It's easier to see this on ebay, where you can list completed auctions (sale or no sale); the items with exorbitant (or merely highly optimistic) prices just sit, auction after auction. It's hard to know if people actually pay those extremely high prices on Amazon or even craigslist (probably kijiji, too) because the mechanism for seeing completed sales does not exist.

[Sonora Shepherd]

I have noticed it on their e-books. Some are a couple dollars higher than they used to be.

[Tradd]

There's a difference between sold by Amazon and sold by someone else. Paying attention to the listing will tell you which it is.

Amazon had said they were going to crack down on price gouging by 3rd party sellers, but who knows if they actually will.