No one is actually going to pay that much, of course. And the seller didn't really set the price to that astronomical figure deliberately.
It's actually the result of Amazon's price-matching algorithms. It happens sometimes with an item that is suddenly in demand but only a couple of sellers are offering it. They have set their price to automatically adjust to some small amount over the next highest price, hoping that the other copy will get sold and then someone will grab their copy for the higher price. When two sellers do that, the two prices "race" upward to these astronomical figures. Eventually someone notices and resets it to something sane.
Most often it happens with text books. But it was amusing to see it happen with an item I just bought.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-09-17 12:56 pm (UTC)It's actually the result of Amazon's price-matching algorithms. It happens sometimes with an item that is suddenly in demand but only a couple of sellers are offering it. They have set their price to automatically adjust to some small amount over the next highest price, hoping that the other copy will get sold and then someone will grab their copy for the higher price. When two sellers do that, the two prices "race" upward to these astronomical figures. Eventually someone notices and resets it to something sane.
Most often it happens with text books. But it was amusing to see it happen with an item I just bought.