Amazon Pre-Order Price Guarantee Query

[issybird]

I’ve been keeping my eye on a book I want that’s not coming out until July 2 (Ben Pastor’s The Night of Shooting Stars). I saw today that the price had dropped to $9.99 from $11.49, not the buy of a lifetime, but it’s movement. I thought of pre-ordering it just to lock in that price while I thought about it, knowing that if the price went down further, I’d get it the lower price (and usually there’s a big dip in the price of Bora books right about the time they come out).

But!

I wasn’t entirely confident, so I dug a little and was displeased to come across the following:

The Pre-order Price Guarantee applies only to qualifying items displaying the offer message on their product detail pages. Items that do not display the offer message do not qualify, regardless of the nature of the items.

This was new to me. Granted, I don’t buy a lot of Kindle books and I pre-order virtually nothing at all, but I still thought that the pre-order price guarantee was a blanket guarantee on all Kindle pre-orders, ensuring you got the lowest price once you ordered it while protecting yourself from a price increase. It seems not. Was this always the case with Kindle books, or is it a new limitation?

The guarantee, obviously, isn’t on the book page. At $9.99, I don’t feel as if this is the best I can do so I shall play chicken and hope that even if the price goes back up, it’ll go down again in the next three months before it’s released. It won’t kill me to wait on it, either.

I’m pretty sure I’ve listed it at ereaderiq so none of this is world-changing, but I’m curious in terms of future purchases.

[poohbear_nc]

I routinely pre-order Kindle ebooks - and the email acknowledgements have always contained the phrase "this price or lower". I've never experienced paying a higher price when the ebook is released, but then again, I've never experienced a price drop either.

As far as I can tell, pre-ordering locks in the price.

[rhadin]

I preorder hardcovers, not ebooks, from Amazon and the language Issybird quoted has been around for as long as I can remember. Some books do not get a price guarantee, although it has been very few. I have now started using an application called Honey Droplist to track prices. It lets me set the length of time (up to 120 days) I want to track an item's price and how much of a discount has to happen before it sends me an alert. I have been using it for about 4 months as a Chrome add-in/extension and it works very well. I will often have it track a price at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Honey also will give you a product's price history. I'd suggest checking it out.

[issybird]

Thanks both. The language was new to me, but I had scant history to go on and had just assumed that the price guarantee applied to all digital purchases. Now I know better.

Ten bucks is really more than I’m willing to pay for that sort of book anyway, but I was tempted in the sense that if the price went down and I missed it, I’d still get the lower price. But without that advantage, I’ll just wait it out.