Why On Earth is this Book so Much on Amazon???

I’ve never been able to quite understand the Amazon prices.  I’ve seen a single book be offered for anywhere from $6 to over $200 dollars, all at the same time.  It seems to happen frequently.  There can’t be THAT much difference in condition!

What was the original price of the book?

(Edited post to read as follows….)

I re-read some of the thread I had linked in this post, and I realized it is several pages long and very involved. I’m basically lazy, so I was just trying to avoid restating what I had written about obnoxiously high priced Amazon listings….but I don’t want you all to have to read for hours to find out what I said! So, here’s my cut-and-paste from an earlier thread:

The seller of that book listed at $287 is a “drop-shipper.”  I wondered about the unusually high prices that sometimes appear in Amazon listings, so I did a little searching recently and asked the question, “Why are some prices on Amazon so ridiculously high?” or some question like that.  What I found is that some sellers are “drop-shippers,” people who list books they don’t actually have in stock, then they buy them from other suppliers once they make a sale–that’s okay, when I sold Tupperware, I didn’t stock the items at my house–except some of these drop-shippers post them at crazy prices hoping to make one sale to someone who thinks there must be a reason it’s so high-priced. I also found it interesting that some drop-shippers will actually purchase the book from another Amazon listing to fill the order they have received.

I also read a report online that said: “They have a software program that automatically posts books for most of the ISBN’s available on Amazon at a price much higher than market. If they cannot find a cheaper copy available on the net, they’ll refund the order.”  I won’t post the link to this report (on the Rip-Off Report website) because some of the ads alongside their reports are just….horrible.

Obviously, a majority of the sellers on Amazon offer competitively prices books and are making a legitimate profit. I have bought a number of books on Amazon and have been quite happy with them.

HTH,

Sue