QUESTION: For used book listings of the same price, what determines which one is on the top? I assume that the top placement ensures faster sales.
ANSWER: You are right, the Marketplace listing at the top is likely to sell faster, simply because it’s on top. Many buyers don’t take the trouble to compare prices, feedback and other factors.
When Amazon started Marketplace, for items priced the same, the date of the listing determined which appeared on top. Recently listed items would appear on top of other listings that had been created earlier. Several years ago, when I had many penny listings for mass market paperbacks, I used to delete those listings every few days, then relist so they’d appear at the top of the offer page again.
Then a couple of years ago, Amazon changed that system, and it appeared to be random. You could reload the page, and the same-price listings would change order.
Now, however, it looks like the positions of listings don’t change when the page is reloaded. So, perhaps they’ve gone back to the old system — the most recent listing that appears on top.
One new wrinkle is that shipping prices are included in the sorting. That’s the default. If they want, buyers can sort by “Prime” shipping offers only, or exclude shipping prices from the sorting.
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2 Comments
Are there other sorting factors – Store Name etc?
Also will a book for $10.94 sell before $10.95?
Ah, the mystery is solved. Kevin O’Brien of SpaceWare informs me that listings with identical prices are still being displayed in a random order. However, simply reloading the page no longer changes the sorting (presumably because of caching, but Kevin hasn’t tested this). In any case, he’s tested and validated this: If you view different same-price offers for a book on multiple computers, the order on each PC will be different.