Amazon is a name that the vast majority of people will know by now, and it’s one that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. Having expanded from being known mostly for books into selling practically everything and anything, Amazon is a household name across the United States and is expanding all over the world., and for a lot of customers in the US Amazon is the one de facto place that they guarantee a good price with reasonable delivery no matter where they are. Speaking of price, Amazon has apparently made some changes to the way they deal with price reductions once someone has purchased an item from Amazon.
Some of you reading this might have experienced this, but it seems as though Amazon would willingly refund the difference on an item you recently purchased if you contact Customer Services. So for instance, if you purchased an Android tablet and a week later it was reduced by $40, Amazon would more than likely refund you this difference between the price you paid and the new price, but Amazon are rumored to have stopped this now. Recode was alerted to this change in behavior by the startup, Earny, which scours users’ emails for receipts of online purchases and then lets them know if the price has fallen, risen and so on. Earny could theoretically help more users get more money out of Amazon by alerting them to these changes in their account. This also raises the question of how Amazon views apps and services that extend Amazon’s functionality for users, Earny – as well as others – ask users to give up their login information in order to get price information, deal notifications and so on.
An Amazon spokesperson told Recode that the policy hasn’t actually changed at all, and that it was originally only intended for TVs, and that TVs are still valid to get a refund on the difference after someone had purchased a set and the price had fallen. It’s possible that this was a sort of unwritten rule of Amazon, that to keep customers happy and willing to come back time-after-time they should openly refund them the difference for any changes in price, but as is so often the case with secrets and unwritten rules, there’s no stopping a company from changing the rules without warning and few consequences.