> It's too complex for Amazon minimum wage drones to understand why this is a scam, so you can't do anything about it.

Too be fair, it's not exactly a scam. No one is really being cheated out of anything. It's annoying for sure, but there is no deception.

It is a scam. It's a sophisticated scam. I thought I was buying an item. I was giving the seller a free options contract, valued at a few hundred dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_of_options

Price jumped up by a $150, and I never got my item. I needed the item and not receiving it resulted in a couple hundred bucks of damages. If price had gone down a hundred bucks, I would have overpaid by that much.

The seller, by the way, did charge my card. It was marked as shipped. The seller issued a refund on the day it was supposed to arrive, claiming it was "lost in trucking." Many other buyers had their orders "lost in trucking" too from reviews of that and other sellers.

My opinion is that Amazon should have made the seller fulfill the orders. At the time I ordered, several items were available at the same price. At the time I was to receive the order, price had gone up $150. It's not like the seller couldn't have fulfilled it; they would have just taken a loss to do so.

I'll mention this isn't the only time I got scammed on Amazon this year; just the most clever scam.

Never mind third-party sellers, I've had Amazon themselves pull this on me with a book I pre-ordered directly from them.

On the day my order was supposed to be delivered, it mysteriously became "unavailable", only to reappear a couple of weeks later at a higher price.

> It's not like the seller couldn't have fulfilled it; they would have just taken a loss to do so.

Contract law exists to enforce contracts that one party doesn't want to complete because they regret entering into the deal once they have more information, or the costs change, etc.

You could try to sue the vendor in small claims court to recover your damages, including the costs of the suit. The vendor is counting on you and other parties not actually doing that.

The problem is that the vendor is technically Amazon; they are the one who provide the technical, financial and logistical services as well as profit from it (if the scam went in the seller's favor). The seller itself is likely abroad.

We have a regulatory problem here where you think you deal with a local company abiding by local laws, you get charged by a local company that's supposed to be abiding by local laws (Amazon charges customers and they pays out the sellers later), but when things go wrong they can suddenly pull the "we are a platform" get-out-of-jail-free card. This should not be possible.

Out of curiosity, what was the item that has such price swings?

Chest freezer.

A lot of items had these swings though: face masks were the most obvious, but virtually all emergency supplies went through major up-and-down spikes. Dry shelf-stable food, some medicines, toilet paper, etc. All of a sudden, the whole world wanted to stock up.

That made it really hard to buy those items if you have a non-emergency use for them.

Ahh I hadn't thought of COVID related price changes. Thanks for the response!

Charging the card and not yet shipping is a scam.

But they don't charge the card until they ship.

Yes but they tie up the opportunity to charge the card for weeks on end while you try to get them to ship or have Amazon cancel it. Imagine buying a $500 widget and the seller delays and delays. You decide to order elsewhere and then finally the seller fulfills the order. You are now committed to $1000 of widget when you only wanted one.

But when you buy from the second vendor you can just cancel the first order.

Amazon lets you cancel any time before shipment. They don't do pre-auths on the card either.

imo it's a bit like an auction where the seller can accept or refuse to honor the outcome, depending on the highest bid.

but is there actually "no deception"? i mean, if i order something i'm usually reasonally sure i'll actually get the product. them not honoring their side of the contract does seem like deception.

I switched mainly to eBay a few years ago. No inventory commingling, and the users generally post seller reviews associated with the seller instead of on a generic product page.

File a dispute with your bank.

If you do that, you'll never have to worry about getting scammed at Amazon again, since they'll probably close your account.

"Amazon wouldn't refund my Prime" -> I assumed this was to close account :)

And i believe they wouldn't close the account.

Why would you assume that? A prime subscription is not a requirement for an Amazon account. It seems to me they were saying that they didn't want to pay for expedited shipping if Amazon couldn't provide expedited shipping.

And it is fairly common for online retailers to ban accounts that do charge-backs. Amazon will ban people for having too many returns.

Ok, then open another one. It is a bit time consuming but at least you don't take the loss.

It's not that easy, Amazon closes accounts that attempt to evade their bans too, by cross referencing shipping addresses, names, emails, credit cards, IP addresses, etc.

> Aliexpress and eBay seem ahead of Amazon now.

Wow, that is bad.