Amazon marketplace why so cheap

For this product, there were none. A lot of products have deceptive sale prices like this, to varying degrees. Knowing what the actual going rate is for a product puts you in charge. Alternatively, the Keepa extension for Chrome will add a similar uglier box right into Amazon. Tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel may also help you determine the best time to buy a big ticket item.

And for Black Friday, it dipped even lower. The tools can help you spot similar trends in other products, like televisions, which tend to get a lot cheaper when Christmas draws near. Amazon's 5-star review system is supposed to make choosing products simpler, but it's easily gamed.

Many sellers try to manipulate reviews to get their products listed more prominently on Amazon. ReviewMeta is an excellent tool to help you spot deceptive reviews. Just plug in an Amazon URL and it'll give you a report. It won't tell you how good a product is, and it isn't a flawless tool, but it will give you a hint at whether a lot of reviews are fake or suspicious.

Fakespot is a similar tool, but its analysis isn't as comprehensive. For example, this Hayke juicer looks fantastic at first glance, but ReviewMeta adjusted its score from 4. Or just read the reviews yourself. Click on the link to reviews under the product name on a page and you'll end up on a reviews page like this one. To start, browse through the Customer Questions.

You also want to be alert for reviews that sound like other reviews, ones that repeat key marketing phrases, or any that seem overly happy and wordy. Sellers, meanwhile, could be competing with potentially hundreds of rivals for that one prime spot in the Buy Box.

As befits its roots as an auction site, eBay gives shoppers the freedom to compare multiple listings for the same item. Some will be new, some used, some in better condition than others, most will have differing options for shipping.

This all combines to make eBay shopping a far more considered, nuanced experience. This is good news for sellers. You have more opportunities to tweak your listing to appeal to different audiences. The difference in competition between eBay and Amazon would appear to favor eBay, at least for sellers. You simply have more opportunities to get your product seen, and an audience who are more likely to spend time deliberating.

Amazon is ruthlessly competitive, with many different sellers aiming for one single spot; the Buy Box. However, this could potentially work in your favor. But in most cases, eBay provides a more reasonable experience for sellers. Of course, a huge market and an easy sale are only the beginning. Which platform provides the quickest and most convenient shipping and fulfillment for eCommerce? Fulfilment by Amazon FBA is a service letting you store your products in your nearest Amazon warehouse.

From there, Amazon will pick, pack, and ship on your behalf when a sale is made. They handle customer support , remove negative feedback due to shipping, and can also ship sales made through other channels. Yes, that includes eBay. You ship from your own facilities, but you still qualify for the Amazon Prime badge. Right now, eBay has no shipping and fulfillment services for domestic sellers. This could be a particular barrier to new sellers.

Having to set up shipping and fulfillment from scratch, without support from the platform, is obviously costly. Even if eBay were to start offering such a service tomorrow, it would be competing with the most advanced delivery service on Earth, starting from scratch.

Amazon pledged to root out unscrupulous sellers, but customers can always do their part by refusing to buy supplies at insane markups. Many items on Amazon are perpetually on sale — or so Amazon wants you to think, with its crossed-out list prices.

Before being suckered in by what seems like a fat discount, check out an item's price history using a tracker such as Camelcamelcamel. Because prices fluctuate on Amazon often, sometimes by significant amounts, what appears to be a good sale may not be anything approaching a real deal.

For more smart shopping tips, please sign up for our free newsletters. The Amazon Echo and Echo Dot have become inescapable. So have their chief competitors, Google Home and Google Home Mini, but if you think you'll score a deal on those on Amazon, think again. Amazon is ruthless about pushing its own tech for cheap, but look elsewhere for bottom-dollar deals from rivals Google and Apple. It's annoying to lug that heavy bag of pet food home from the store.

All the same, Amazon probably isn't your best bet for keeping Fido full. According to an analysis by Consumers' Checkbook, the best place to shop online for pet food is Chewy. Paper towels, toilet paper, tissues, dish soap, detergent — these are the things a typical household goes through at a rapid clip.

And while it's tempting to turn to Amazon to fill those needs without running to the store, Cheapism has found that the online retailer still can't compete with Costco.

If trekking to Costco sounds like a pain, using Amazon's Subscribe and Save program can bring down prices. Just be aware that subscribing doesn't lock prices in, which can be risky. Some big-name companies have parted ways with Amazon, preferring not to dilute their brands by selling through the online giant.

One of them is Birkenstock, which called it quits with Amazon in That means there's a much higher risk that any "Birkenstocks" you buy through Amazon now aren't genuine. Like Birkenstock, Nike decided to say "thanks, but no thanks" to Amazon, declining to sell directly to the company after it decided Amazon wasn't doing enough to limit resellers and counterfeiters.

That means shoppers can't be nearly as confident that they'll be getting genuine Nike goods when buying on Amazon. You can cheap out on a phone case or a smartwatch band, but a phone charger is one accessory where you want to stick to tried-and-true retailers. A knockoff charger may not protect your smartphone from power surges that could fry its very expensive insides — probably not worth the few bucks you might save.

As Vice notes , the cheaper these are, the less likely they are to be safe. Look for chargers that are certified by your phone manufacturer or, to be even safer, made by the manufacturer itself. To be clear, you can get a great deal buying a mattress on Amazon. But buying a mattress is, at best, an imprecise science, and savvy buyers will want as long a trial period as possible before they're locked into their purchase. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, you get only a day window when buying on Amazon to decide whether your mattress is a match.

Since longer mattress trials aren't hard to find these days, consider looking elsewhere, or checking to see whether buying directly from the mattress maker will get you a longer trial. Working with this Amazon conversion tracking tool catapulted our Facebook marketing performance into entirely new dimensions. The bottom line is that with analytics, you finally know whether:. Amazon Sponsored Products is by far the fastest way to get your product on the first page of Amazon search results.

If a person is searching on Amazon for your product, you can buy an ad relative to those search terms, and your offer will appear next to the best results. The great thing about Amazon Sponsored Products is that it is very easy to set up. You can do it in a matter of minutes. We did realize pretty early in the process, though, that even in a simple interface, you have to manage your account carefully and regularly to avoid an exploding marketing budget.

I recommend either having someone in-house watching your campaigns very closely or working with MarketPlaceClicks, who is managing our account for us. The number one reason is that your ultimate goal is to be on the first page of the search results and, if possible, in the top three listing.

This is where the big money is made, not by a single sale on your site. Apart from our website, we point every link on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, our blog posts and our email newsletter to one specific Amazon product page. You can build high search engine ranking for your own online store through content marketing and influencer outreach work to gain backlinks from relevant, high-quality sites.

Get your products in the hands of bloggers and Youtubers. Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Choose the Youtubers and bloggers who fit best with your product and brand, and offer them free review samples. Remember, you want to have this product in the top three of the first page of search results, so you have to ensure that all the traffic is going to that one product. We put our best quote on the outside packaging and, for our most important products, we include a customer case study inside a small booklet.

Create effective Google Ad campaigns. We spent a lot of money on Google in our early days. The amount and the quality of reviews are the most important aspects of your reviews to increase your conversion rate.

Here are a few ways to increase your number of authentic product reviews. Before getting into the details, this subject requires a quick warning, as Amazon is currently cracking down on sellers buying fake reviews. Even if the customer is leaving a disclaimer that he got the product for free, it will hurt your product and there is a high chance that Amazon will either delete all those reviews or even suspend your seller account.

Email your customers after purchase and ask for reviews. You can use tools like Feedback Genius to automate this process. You can also use this opportunity to make sure the product was delivered correctly and give the customer a chance to tell you about their experience good or bad so you can make the most of the interaction and build lifetime brand loyalty. Review your seller feedback regularly for people who actually provide positive product feedback and ask them via email to also write a product review.

In particular, the reviews and comments sections will be read by almost all future customers. This is your chance to stand out.