Amazon has an official 30-day low-price guarantee policy on HDTVs. For other items, the last few years, their customer service representatives would often make “one time exceptions” if an item you purchased dropped in price within 7 days after purchase (and you contacted them asking for a refund of the difference).
This soft benefit is apparently going away now according to Re/Code.net which speculates that part of the decision to do so is motivated by a number of 3rd-party services that offer to automatically track price drops of items you purchased and notify you to take advantage of price guarantees. Some of these services require logins to your shopping accounts to do the price-tracking automatically, while others need access to your email. The Amazon representative contacted by Re/Code took a customer security angle to this.
I’m gonna venture a guess that it’s not just security. Security is a very valid concern, I would never let a 3rd-party (especially newly launched startups) have access to my email or shopping accounts. But no doubt about it, this is also a dollars and sense type of thing, if millions of people keep getting small refunds on millions of purchases, it’s goodbye quarterly profits for Amazon and back to losing money 🙂
More discussion via Techmeme.
Oh really!???!! Four or so years ago I bought a camera, Prime, closeout, for $399. from Amazon. About a week later Amazon had the same camera for, if memory serves me, $359. I wrote a polite note asking for a price adjustment. I got a curt note informing Amazon doesn’t (didn’t) do price matches.
It might have been more than seven days past the order date; I can’t remember for sure. I am sure it was very close to that, less than 10 days. I wasn’t pleased.
It may have been more than 7 days, or it may have been at each customer service representatives discretion based on the item/discount/etc or luck of the draw? I think I remember once they said they wouldn’t refund the difference of a TV Season (or something like that). Or maybe they started doing this more consistently after they had a renewed focus on improving customer service (eg adding live phone CSRs, etc)