Amazon.com following in TRU pricing footsteps

LegoFanTexas

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bomber-Asteroid-Field-75008/dp/B00ATX7I8K/

What is up with this? $11.99? These are $9.99 at LEGO Shop @ Home.

This isn't the first time either...

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-City-Police-ATV-60006/dp/B00A88E8NE/
This is $6.99 at LEGO [email protected], $8.99 at Amazon. There are other examples as well.

Did Amazon finally go down the dark path of Toys R Us?

I get that shipping costs have to be eaten by Amazon, a PRIME customer can buy those 2 items and get "free" 2 day shipping, which of course isn't free, but Amazon already has an answer to this:

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-more-Building-Plate/dp/B002RL7VNY/

The Add-On program allows them to sell such items that make no sense otherwise. This is priced right, $4.99 for a blue baseplate (ok, it seems expensive to me, but it is the same price as LEGO, so they aren't marking it over retail).

In return, you can't *just* buy the baseplate, you have to buy $25 worth of items, even if you are PRIME, to get it shipped to you. This is being done to cut their shipping costs, and it is understandable.

So what is up with the $11.99 for the planet sets and $8.99 for the small box sets that should be $6.99?

Joseph

It's hard to tell at the moment, but provided it stays limited to only a few sets it's not all that unusual. I know that Amazon has done this type of thing before (there were other examples, but the only one I can think of is #5969 having a "regular price" of around $10). In fact, this this type of pricing (and third party sellers) is I think the reason why Brickset started using it's own database of MSRPs instead of taking Amazon's word for it on the bargain watch page. So overall, it's not entirely new to Amazon; let's just hope it's not the trend.

tamamahm

This is not new.
When Friends came out over a year ago, the very small sets were marked up a bit as well.

At this time, I have only seen Amazon mark-ups on really small sets. This is highly different than Toys-R-Us pricing.

Brickarmor

It was an issue with #9468 for a while, not sure when they fixed it.

drdavewatford

Joseph said:

In fact, this this type of pricing (and third party sellers) is I think the reason why Brickset started using it's own database of MSRPs instead of taking Amazon's word for it on the bargain watch page. So overall, it's not entirely new to Amazon; let's just hope it's not the trend.

Spot on, @Joseph - when Huw and I were setting up the Amazon Bargain Watch listings 18+ months ago we noticed that a fair few sets had the wrong RRP listed and hence the decision to take the retail price from a more definitive source. So this is far from a new phenomenon.

binaryeye

The one I don't understand is 4203. RRP is $39.99 and Amazon's RRP is $59.99. It seems like it has to be an error, but it has been that way for some time.

Zon

Nothing new here... They have been doing this with the smaller sets for a while now.