It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days. Early on in my computer shopping days I'd hit pricewatch and buy from random vendors based on price. Eventually this company called Newegg often had the near the lowest price always and had great service. I soon went to shopping at Newegg consistently without bothering to go to pricewatch. Newegg could have raised prices slightly but I did not want to waste time with untrusted vendors.
The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.
I never got Prime because the yearly cost of it (even before the price went up) did not amortize to an acceptable shipping cost. I take the slower free shipping because I'm not impatient or buying on impulse.
So I've never been locked into Amazon and always been free to shop around. And I can absolutely confirm that Amazon is no longer the "default" winner on price. Sometimes they are, but often not. I don't even have to spend a lot of time shopping around to find this. The same deals are everywhere now.
Life hack: I have a Prime account as well as the Amazon credit card, and I share it with several of my closest friends. I pay for the account, but the caveat is that my friends (who I trust very much) must use the credit card and then send me money via Venmo. Every purchase they make I get 3% back.
It cancels out the $99/year fairly quickly and then some. Also unlimited photo storage is a huge plus for me.
"It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days"
I have noticed that many books on Amazon UK (outside of the popular categories or bestseller lists) often have little or no discount.*
My recollection is purely anecdotal, but this is a change from when discounts were common across titles in all categories. Having said that, many marketplace sellers offer titles at much steeper discounts than Amazon (even with the additional shipping costs). Of course, Amazon still benefits from those listings.
A few years ago, Amazon aquired bookdepository.co.uk, their biggest online rival in the UK market. They also own Abebooks that specialises in used books. Their domination of online book sales in the UK seems (almost) complete.
So with fewer discounts on books (at least in the UK), it seems logical that Amazon would want to discourage price comparison. And yet the irony is that Amazon dominates online book buying to such a degree that there are few online rivals left to compare prices with. The only major online rivals I can think of in the UK now is wordery.co.uk, or whsmith.co.uk (both of which are often cheaper than Amazon outside the bestseller lists).
*curious to know if anyone else has noticed a drop in price discounts on books on Amazon (from any of their sites)
CCC regurgitates Amazon's own customers back to them. PriceZombie tracks prices on 100+ other stores, they have a Reddit bot that is seen by millions of people every day and they have browser extensions that are used by tens of thousands of people every day. Since Amazon usually has the best price, PZ actually steered customers to Amazon. It is against Reddit's TOS to have affiliate links in bots and against the TOS of most retailers to have affiliate links in extensions - so a massive amount of business was pushed Amazon's way without any benefit to PriceZombie.
PriceZombie's failure was in not expecting Amazon to always have the best price. Not all of the online retailers they track have affiliate programs so if a few of them dropped out because they were losing business it would not be a big loss, but with 90%+ of all purchases coming from Amazon, losing them as an affiliate was a fatal blow.
But that is to the PZ site. Behind PZ is a massive, custom coded data retrieval and searchable storage system that contains three years worth of product and price data from almost every major online retailer - both the technology and data is far more valuable than the PZ website.
> Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively.
I used to do that, but I've started comparison shopping at local retail stores more recently. I've found that for many of the items I was buying that are available locally, Amazon was offering the same price or higher, plus a shipping delay (and the non-trivial hassle I have to go through to pick up some packages).
Plus, retails stores tend to group similar products together and allow you to get an intuitive sense of a products physical qualities, so I think they often provide a better experience. On Amazon, it can be surprisingly hard to answer the "how big is this, really" question.
Now, if I think I can buy an item locally, I try to do that first.
I recently did a fresh computer build for the first time since 2005. I was use to using PriceWatch for parts and buying from smaller stores. I've actually been out of the country for four years, and upon my return, I see most of the small shops are gone. The lowest prices seem to always be Newegg, Amazon, SuperBizz and Microcenter. They've pretty much squished out a lot of the market, and it seems like Newegg allows other vendors to sell through it just like Amazon.
It's kinda sad really. The last city I lived in still had computer stores. The one I moved to doesn't...at all. There are some recycled PC stores, but the only new parts store is a Frys way out of the city. Fuck Frys too.
The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.