Quote:
Originally Posted by wdfifteen
That kind of stuff (pricing arbitrage) frosts my nuts. It's just greedy people with no more ambition than to scheme how to make money off of someone else's risk and hard work.
We had a huge problem with eBay about 10 years ago from companies auctioning magazine subscriptions. All they did was get a photo of your magazine cover and auction off subscriptions for it. They were selling $30 magazines subs for $5 and $10 dollars and expecting publishers to honor the sale. I raised hell with eBay, but they said it was between the buyer and the publisher, if the buyer wasn't happy, he wouldn't buy again - capitalism at it's best! Except the seller had the money and the publisher had the disgruntled buyer, not to mention the problems with the post office.
I think they finally changed their policy, but at the time eBay saw nothing wrong with the practice.
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I set up ecomm for a P&G division, Downey, Dryel, stuff like that. We were pushing a lot of coupons to increase sales and consumer awareness.
Every once in a while I'd get a call from accounting, they have a refund request, they can see that they shipped to the customer but can't find any record of the customer paying which meant no card info to issue a refund.
Drove me nuts for months. One day I re-sort the database looking for something specific and I see this one customer who has bought hundreds of times. I though that was odd, wondered if he was an institutional buyer because no one needed that much product in a year.
I dig a bit deeper and discover not one order was shipped to him. In fact every single order was shipped to someone else and never the same person twice.
So based off his email address I check his website. He's selling literally hundreds of products, not one that he actually purchased or stocked in advance of selling it.
What he was doing was finding deals, free shipping, direct discounts etc... that resulted in him being able to sell the product cheaper than most other places but still have margin in it for him.
A customer would place an order with him, he'd bang their card then he'd buy the product from the vendor using his CC info but his customers ship to and have the vendor drop ship.
I was pretty pissed but had to applaud him for the shear ****ing brilliance of it.
P&G were really pissed at first till I reminded them that all he had done was take a cut from the customer for himself. P&G lost no money on the deals and he sold hundreds of units for them for the minor inconvenience of the odd return / refund issue which was solved by sending the customer a check.
They grudgingly let it go.