Amazon, one of the best business models in the world, recently completed its twentieth year in the market. Its third decade is starting with a bang as it recently announced the Prime Day, “a one-day global shopping event with more deals than Black Friday.” Only members of Amazon’s $99-per-year Prime subscription service can shop for exclusive deals, though non-members interested in exercising their consumer freedom can sign up for a free 30-day trial.“Loss leader designed to bring more customers into Amazon’s orbit” opined Christo Wilson, an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University who studies Web Personalisation is the only explanation for this prime day.
Wilson holds forth on the manufactured shopping day, which promises big savings on scores of products. When asked about his ongoing research and the principles behind Amazon’s algorithmic pricing practices, he exclaimed,“Amazon’s marketplace is specifically designed to allow third-party sellers to change their prices in real-time using algorithms. Occasionally these algorithms go haywire, like the infamous example of the used genetics textbook that ended up costing $24 million.”
These algorithms change the actual prices of these commodities multiple times in a single day that makes it diligent to know whether their potential and actual customers are tasting good deals or not. On normal days, websites like Camel CamelCamel and Paribus offer great tools to help shoppers get the best deals on Amazon. On Prime Day, however, Wilson suspected that the deals will be very good and no comparison shopping will be necessary; the goal of Prime Day is really to get more people to sign-up for Prime, not to make money with algorithmic tricks.Christo feels that the retailers aren’t aware about the horizons of marketing these online platforms have explored. Algorithms tend not to work well on social media.
Harminder Singh
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