Amazon announced on Tuesday its 'Make an Offer' program. The initiative will allow shoppers to haggle with sellers. It is a move that was described as a "game-changer" by the e-commerce giant.
Following in the footsteps of the likes of eBay and Priceline, Amazon is now allowing sellers to place a 'Make an Offer' button next to their product listing "to show customers they are willing to negotiate for a lower price than the price listed". It hopes to give its online store the atmosphere of a physical shop, where shoppers feel comfortable pushing for a better deal in addition to driving extra sales for the businesses it hosts.
"The new Make an Offer experience is a game-changer for Amazon customers looking for great prices on one-of-a-kind items, and for sellers looking to communicate and negotiate directly with customers in an online marketplace environment just like they do normally in their own physical store," said Peter Faricy, vice-president for Amazon Marketplace. "In a recent survey of our sellers, nearly half of the respondents told us that the ability to negotiate prices with customers would be important to drive more sales on Amazon. Make an Offer delivers that functionality and makes customers feel confident they are getting an item they want at the lowest price possible."
Make an offer is only for one-of-a-kind items, not every day consumer products
The Seattle-based firm will be rolling the new program out across around 150,000 items initially, ranging from sports, entertainment and historic collectibles and fine art. It said that the new program will be extended to "hundreds of thousands of items" by 2015.
By giving shoppers more transparency on pricing, the new program will help the site's third-party merchants that sell on Amazon's marketplace. The buyer's proposed price will be sent to the seller via an email, where they can then decide to accept, reject, or counter the offer. Once the two parties agree on a price, the item can then be placed into the buyer's cart. Whether this will cause sellers to simply raise their prices to allow for more bargaining room remains to be seen, whilst another possibility could be that some sellers may not negotiate much at all over email.
The company does stress that the new system is not meant to be an auction, and that buyers will never pay more than the listed price, meaning that the seller can't pitch one buyer off another in order to get the highest bid for their item, at least until they figure a way to game the system. Furthermore Amazon made it clear that the Make an Offer program will only apply to one-of-a-kind items and not to mass-produced products.
4K streaming on Prime instant video
Amazon updated its streaming video app by adding 4K video streaming to the list of Prime benefits, starting today.
Although the list of available 4K UltraHD media is relatively small, which includes mostly Amazon original series like Alpha House and Transparent on top of a selection of 4K movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment, the list is said to grow in time.
Unfortunately, the 4K content will only be available within the US to start with, and the bandwidth requirements are as yet unknown. We are told that viewers will need to use an approved 4K Smart TV from LG, Sony or Samsung to watch the content, and it will not work on 4K-capable monitors at this time.
