This is starting to get highly entertaining… unless you didn’t realize it was a phantom sale and overpaid.

Remember how we were talking about Amazon listing a Marvel sale a couple days back, except the sale prices were all digital list prices?

Guess what?

They did it again.

This time it’s the Harrow County and Death head sale:

Here’s how they list it at the Amazon deals page:

You’ll note that this time they’re not calling out 65% off, however, if we go over to Comixology, we get:

Those aren’t the same prices, are they?

So if we look at one of these “sale” books on Amazon, we see that standard line about how it’s discounted from the print price, which is a bit of a misdirection.

   And then when we look at the real sale at Comixology, we discover that $9.99 is the digital list price and not some discounted price.

What does this latest fiasco have in common with that botched Marvel sale?  Scroll back up and you’ll see the notation that this is Penguin Random House and “price set by owner,” just like Marvel’s product pages say they set their own price.

Which brings us back to the question of whether the “owner” is forgetting to authorize the sale, even though Amazon has made up a page for it and is promoting it, or Amazon is forgetting to activate the sale prices.  This has been going on a couple weeks, so you’d think MAYBE Amazon might want to review their procedures for running digital comics sales.  Whoever is at fault, this is the same problem with two different publishers and the process appears to be broken.

We’ll see if they delete the sale page and announcement or just activate the sale pricing this time.

Until they get this process working right, you REALLY need to be checking prices against Comixology and other sites.  We’re past “isolated incidents” with this.

3 COMMENTS

  1. “Phantom sales” – that’s one name for scam pricing. Department stores employ these same sales tactics all the time.

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