Photo by Christian Weideger on Unsplash
With the help of its new AI shopping chatbot, Rufus, Amazon is experimenting with allowing some users to access the pricing history of the products sold on its platform.
According to a report from Wired, a limited number of U.S. consumers are able to access an item’s pricing history through a chat with Rufus, which was launched in early February. Navigating to a product page, tapping Rufus, and prompting it with “price history” shows an item’s lowest price on Amazon.com over the prior 30 days, according to Wired.
On Amazon’s app, Rufus can reveal a line chart detailing the item’s pricing trends over the past month.
For consumers, the benefit of seeing an item’s price history is having more confidence that an item on sale is actually a good deal.
A Washington Post article from last fall noted that a fairly common retail tactic is raising the price of an item for a short time, then marking it down to the original price while promoting it as a limited-time, steep discount. Jie Zhang, a professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, told the publication, “This is a form of deceptive pricing.”
The Post noted such practices are illegal but hard to prove because it’s difficult to accurately track retail prices of a specific product over time.
For Amazon, a benefit of letting consumers see recent price moves may be improving pricing credibility. The platform has a reputation for constantly changing prices via sophisticated algorithms.
As an example, the Wired article noted that during Amazon’s recent Prime Big Deal Days event, a LifeStraw personal water filter was on sale for $10, half off its listed original price of $20. The pricing history revealed the price had dropped as low as $14 over the last 30 days, likely leading a customer to see themselves getting a solid 30% discount from the Prime Big Deal Days offer, albeit not 50% off.
Google Shopping offers a price history tool that lets online shoppers know “if a product's price is low, typical, or high, and how its price changed in recent months” across the retailers linked to its platform. For instance, the product page for a Hamilton Beach Toaster Oven shows the item’s price has ranged as low as $35 and as high as $58 based on stores across the web over the past three months, with the best current deal being available at Walmart for $39.99.
For Amazon shoppers, rogue sites employing a browser extension, such as camelcamelcamel and Keepa, detail the price history of products on the platform for months and sometimes years. Camelcamelcamel, the best-known price tracker, has been around since 2008, showing there’s some consumer interest in such price transparency.