Amazon degraded shopping- you have to put in cart to see the price

15 points by talkingtab 73 days ago | 13 comments

I just went to Amazon and searched for "espresso tamper". Of the 15 top results only ONE had a price. Fourteen (14) say "See options" then "put in cart to see price"

My first thought is that it was insane. My second thought was that they must be going broke to make this kind of change. Maybe there is some other reason, but I'm wondering if I need to find an alternative.

Oh and in order to comment on this post you need to put it in your cart first! :-)

LarsAlereon 73 days ago |

This is just an Amazon site issue, lots of things are broken right now. This problem specifically appears to be caused by the site not being able to determine your location to ship to.

al_borland 73 days ago | |

Why should that matter for anything but the shipping price, which shouldn't even be needed on the product page?

freakynit 73 days ago | | |

Exactly. The usual pattern is to calculate shipping "during" the checkout phase, not before. i/f a customer demands to know it earlier, the site can always ask for shipping details separately and show the final price on the same product details page.

apothegm 72 days ago | | |

Tariffs?

thefern 73 days ago |

I thought that was the default behavior. I think in terms of engineering, it sort of makes sense. Since a product can have multiple sellers. I am sure they could change it. My gripe was making a list for example, and wanting to see the total before adding to cart. It is PITA nevertheless. I am sure there is some psychology behing it like once you put it in cart, they give you a "cheaper" price you have nothing to compare it against. I've logged in with different accounts before and saw different prices. These days I try to buy local as much as I can.

psyklic 73 days ago |

Recently about half of the items sold to me as "New" have arrived used or counterfeit. The sellers have 5-star ratings, despite numerous reviews about receiving used or fake products. Unfortunately, Amazon crosses out these negative reviews and doesn't count them toward the overall seller rating.

RedCats 73 days ago |

Honesty, the shopping experience on Amazon is really bad. If you've ever used Chinese e-commerce websites, you'll find that most of them are much better than Amazon. Not only are the products cheap enough, but the logistics are fast, and the customer service, website experience, and so on are all great. I think the reason is that they face too little competition.

nobody9999 73 days ago |

I'm having the same issue. But it's more than that at this point.

Once I worked out what I wanted to purchase, clicking the "Proceed to Checkout " button returns a "Sorry, something went wrong" error.

So not only are there issues with getting prices, one (at least me) can't even buy what they want.

It's not a huge deal (for me at least). Hopefully it will be resolved soon.

endless-forge 73 days ago |

This is a known dark pattern called "price anchoring friction." By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google. You can't screenshot-compare a price that doesn't exist. It's deliberate, not broken.

nobody9999 73 days ago | |

>This is a known dark pattern called "price anchoring friction."

It is and it really sucks.

>By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google.

If that's what they actually did all the time, you'd be right. However, pretty much all the time (except in the past few hours), Amazon does not do that.

All you need to do to confirm that is a web search. What's more, if that were the case, sites like CamelCamelCamel[0] couldn't exist. Yet they do.

Amazon is and does objectionable things all the time. If you wish to dump on Amazon, more power to you.

But if you're going to do so, why not do it based on actual issues and not ones you made up based on what appears to be a back end outage (which seems to be resolved now, with prices, as is normal, prominently displayed on product pages ) at Amazon over the past few hours?

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

Edit: Removed extraneous and incorrect assertion.

johng 73 days ago |

I just noticed this happening on bed frames that I'm looking for. First time I've seen it happen where the top 20 results refused to show a price. It's absolutely stupid.

busymom0 73 days ago |

I just started having this problem too. Items which were in my cart have a price but when I click ok the item, the prices keep loading forever.

agambrahma 73 days ago |

Tried mobile app, mobile website, desktop website

Cannot place an order to ship (!)