This costume on Amazon recently caught my attention. The Deluxe version costs about $35. Upgrading to the Super Deluxe shown here costs an additional $19,975, though the pictures look identical.

Is this merely an error, or a diabolically extreme version of an old pricing strategy to make the Deluxe look like a good deal, lowering sales resistance?

Intentional or not, I’d be curious to see before-and-after sales data for the Deluxe to know whether it worked.

Putting items in the “Save for Later” cart is great for watching Amazon adjust prices: every time you open your shopping cart to buy something else, it details all the changes that have taken place. And most of the prices do change, almost every day. Sometimes the price on a particular item starts to drop steadily, a few dollars a day over several days, until it approximately matches the discounted prices competitors are offering at the time. Then it snaps back to regular price a few days later. Sometimes the motion is more complicated, presumably due to algorithms beyond my ken that adjust the price by pennies at a time.

It must be fun to run a store where you can do this kind of thing as an experiment.