Amazon used to provide a price protection policy, if you purchased an item and it went down in price within seven days they would refund you the difference. The downside to this price protection policy is that you had ask for this refund, most people didn’t bother tracking the price drops so it wasn’t a very expensive policy for Amazon to have.
Recently a bunch of apps and websites (most notably Paribus) have made this easier for consumers by automating the process and taking a cut of any of the money they got you refunded. Â As far as I know Amazon didn’t have an official policy when it came to price protection, it’s just something they offered customers (and customer service representatives would specifically mention this unofficial policy when processing these requests).
Unfortunately it looks like this is no longer the case and they will no longer refund you the difference if you purchase an item that has gone down in price. Apparently they will still continue this unofficial policy on TVs.
Hat tip to Tech Crunch
I recently called Amazon about price protection on a $1.74 difference. (Asking if I could get a refund, or will I need to buy the item again and return the first one.) After checking, the csr said that they can’t do it, however they’ll give me a $3 courtesy credit instead.
Fat Wallet has had a similar discussion for about a month.
https://www.fatwallet.com/forums/deal-discussion/1495302/
Amazon has become one crappy website. Very high minimums to get free shipping. Very slow shipping and the minimums to be met have to be on things being shipped from amazon not just any product that says free shipping (i.e its not enough to buy $49 worth of products. They have to be right products)
And their search is not that great.
You’re seriously complaining about getting something for free?
Newsflash: There are costs associated with shipping
I am complaining that it has become worse than it was.
Are you really happy that you will get to vote for trump because it’s not hillary. Or the other way depending on your political persuasion.
You can make the best of what you have, and still complain about what it should be.
Fair enough reasoning. I’m in agreement
Wow, that’s pretty crappy. While Paribus didn’t find a ton of lower prices for me on Amazon, getting that little bit back from time to time was pretty nice.
Guess we can always try Citi Price Rewind, but you’d obvi have to pay with a Citi card.
Or Discover, chase freedom/CSP, some MasterCard, …
Just got back $250 actually from a Mastercard PriceProtection claim when a suit I bought went on sale at 40% off a month latter….
Not surprising, I was reselling (scalping tbh, blame nintendo) some stuff on FBA and got an insight into how abusable this feature was. I sold three copies rare game with a retail price of $70 for ~$200 each, but in all three of the cases I found the people who paid that got the price somehow matched to the suggested retail price. Amazon first charged me for this, but after calling their policy is to credit you the amount back since I had no control over Amazon’s bizarre price matching policy.
The FBA rep I talked to seemed really exasperated at the situation, essentially saying that Amazon was too lenient with their policy, but there was little to no communication between them and the people who decided whether or not to price match. They couldn’t even see the exact reason for the refund, but the FBA people figured it was a price match (the item hadn’t even shipped in 2/3 of the cases).
Sucks for Paribus; they had a great idea. Was happy to give them a cut