E-Commerce Genius or Consumer-Fooler? An Inside Look at Amazon's Low Prices

We have all been there. Whether during class, late at night, or sitting in Starbucks waiting for our wrongly-spelled names to be called; Amazon shopping sprees. People of the millennial generation have essentially been taught that e-commerce giant Amazon has the lowest prices on all things, but is this actually true or have we all been scammed? There's no doubt that Amazon is an incredibly convenient way to shop. On our laptops, just a few clicks and we can have packages big or small delivered to our doors in as little as two days. From our phones, we can turn on "one-click" shopping or have "dash buttons" for our most frequently shopped items. It is so easy to shop for millions of products on Amazon.com. One thing Amazon touts is their low prices. For years now, if you go to a store such as Best Buy or Target for a phone case or memory card for your camera, people still pull up the Amazon app on their phones to compare prices there. Rather than checking competing stores' prices, consumers default to checking Amazon. I am one of these people. Research shows that the Seattle-based company tricks their consumers into thinking they have the lowest prices around by changing their prices on their products up to five times in just one hour. This technique is being classified as "the psychology of price perception." This might sound like a bunch of gibberish to the average consumer, but what it really means what Amazon is doing is discounting big items, such as a new 50-inch LG 4K television by large percentages, then changing prices on their lesser-popular items to be much more in order to compensate for the lost profit on the television while still making up their profits elsewhere. This begs the question; is Amazon an e-commerce genius or a consumer-fooler? Well, why can't they be both? Clearly something is working for them.