Coronavirus changed many purchasing habits in 2020. With the anxiety of pandemic situation of today, we built a different purchasing process. Online shopping became more popular in recent days. Fear of disease changed our habits. In such crisis times, people may get the idea of “selling more” and “selling for more” due to the inevitable nature of anxious purchasing habits.
Governments and local management systems are taking measures to prevent people to make advantageous sales by using the fear of pandemic situation. However, they are not the only ones. Websites like Amazon are also taking this situation seriously. “Price Gouging” is the term for the people who would like to gain advantage by selling products for outrageous prices. They purchase products for normal price and yet they would like to sell them for more. And sellers are trying to catch these people who are looking for unfairly advantageous selling processes.
With the fear of COVID-19, people built a tendency to purchase more of the health-related products. Hand sanitizers, masks, vitamins and immune system boosters are selling more than ever. Unfortunately, price gouging is happening for those products more.
According to a New York Times article, in United States, Matt and Noah Colvin decided to purchase all the hand sanitizing products from places like Dollar Tree, Walmart, Staples and Home Depot. They cleared the shelves of hand sanitizers. However, they did not purchase these sanitizers for health or anxiety issues. They wanted to unfair money by price gouging. They listed each product on Amazon with extreme prices. They sold 300 products with different prices of $8 to $70. They liked the money they get and they wanted more.
What Did Amazon Do?
However, Amazon took their products out of the list due to “price gouging”. They realized there was an extreme amount of increase in the prices of the products. They wiped out these people from the website. And Matt and Noah left with 17.000 hand sanitizers all alone.
Of course, Colvin family is not alone in stockpiling and price gouging in these days. However, the movement that started to clear these people from unfairly advantageous selling processes spread all over the world.
How can we see who is selling for more and unfairly advantageously? Websites like amazon and e-bay has their own price tracking tools to figure out the anomalies in prices each day. Price tracking technologies are building up a groundbreaking foundation to realize the true intentions of online selling / purchasing habits. Knowing who is selling for which price with the technology of price tracking tools may change not only our sales strategies but change the world for a better place. Determining the intentions and excessive prices may bring better actions for everybody.
Price Monitring Is The Best Solution
Price Tracking Tools don’t work for price determination and competition monitoring. It also works to see the anomalies in the prices all together. This is why we need advanced technology in online purchasing processes more, and tools like PriceRest can help to understand these situations better.
