It Looks Like a Pricing Investigation Might be Underway into Amazon's Policies - The UpStream

It Looks Like a Pricing Investigation Might be Underway into Amazon's Policies

posted Saturday Jul 22, 2017 by Scott Ertz

It Looks Like a Pricing Investigation Might be Underway into Amazon's Policies

Last week was Amazon Prime Day, and the company was very happy with the results. One of the issues that we pointed out was that some products were more expensive during their Prime Day deal than they had been the day or two previous. We pointed to one product in particular, which was $20 more than it has been in recent days.

Consumer Watchdog, whose name clearly describes their purpose, issued a study that showed that, like on Prime Day, the pricing listed on Amazon is often misleading. Of the 1000 products tested, about 46% of the products showed that the reference price for a sale were higher than during the quarter leading up to the sale. This means that Amazon's product listings falsely showed a greater sale discount than the customer was actually receiving, exactly what was noted during Prime Day.

A letter was sent to the Federal Trade Commission following the study, urging an investigation into the issue. While the FTC has not commented on whether or not they will be investigating this claim, it is likely that they will. Amazon is in the process of purchasing Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, a company that has its own issues with consumer groups. As part of that purchase, the FTC will be running investigations, so this will likely be part of that existing process.

Amazon has responded to the report, saying,

The study issued by Consumer Watchdog is deeply flawed, based on incomplete data and improper assumptions. The conclusions the Consumer Watchdog group reached are flat out wrong. We validate the reference prices provided by manufacturers, vendors and sellers against actual prices recently found across Amazon and other retailers.

Have you ever experienced false pricing on Amazon? Let us know in the comments.

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