Do my eyes deceive me..?

[Karlos Santos]

I assume that's a mistake, all of their other books are reasonably priced.

Yeah i saw that. It just how can you get it so wrong, where does the extra digit come from..?

I might send them a message.

[ThinkAboutIt]

I don't think that's a mistake I've checked the shop and there are lots of other books way more expensive than the "Bible"

[fullenglishpint]

Jeez, I think they got it wrong by a factor of 10...

[keithace]

if he sells it for that i say you contact him about being your distributor from now on...

[Karlos Santos]

if he sells it for that i say you contact him about being your distributor from now on...

If he sells it for that much maybe he can sell this little collection, each one at the same price, each one signed by Rainer





ps - I would never sell my signed copies...never.

[mostapha]

It's happened on Amazon more often than the eBay marketplace, but it's probably a computer error…and actually a fairly minor one compared to some I've seen (they're really rare).

The short version is that people have figured out two ways to appeal to different kinds of buyers.

• Being the cheapest seller. (to save them money)
• Being just barely more expensive then the cheapest. (to imply credibility)

So…people write scripts to set their prices for them, by trolling the listings for that product, scraping the price, and applying some algorithm to it.

If you're type 1, you multiply the lowest price by something like .98. If you're type 2, you multiply by something like 1.05.

The weird thing happens when there's one of each type competing with each other on the same item. If the two values multiply to <1, the price drops very quickly. If it multiplies to >1, it can grow very quickly.

This issue has been seen in both ways: actually valuable (but not particularly rare) items selling for $0.01, and relatively normal items (the first one I saw was a book) selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It's all just bad scripting.

I'd bet that's what's happening, and it got stuck at 350 quid because eBay doesn't let you change prices as often as Amazon does.

The weird thing is that it's possible he doesn't even have the book for sale. The way this gets really ridiculous is when someone sells something they don't actually own yet…for, say, 105% of the cheapest seller's price…they sell it, buy it from the cheapest seller, and have the cheapest seller send it directly to their buyer. It's a risky endeavor, but if your price-setting algorithm is good enough, it makes money a little at a time with very little effort.

Those are the ones that tend to lead to really ridiculous pricing issues when the algorithms get screwed up.

[Sublim&All]

I just thought it also did blow jobs.

[djlotus]

Not going to sell at that price. Just like all those dicks who try to sell Mk2's for $500.