Getting discounts using hidden passwords and codes are fun and exciting.
Take for example Amazons hidden discount pages. Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. They sell everything from books, exercise equipment, food, electronics, to clothing. If there is something you can think of chances are Amazon sells it. Amazon’s hidden discount web pages offer items at a discount of up to 99 percent. Amazing deals!
As you can imagine Amazon deals with tons of inventory. So they’re constantly discounting items to make room for new inventory and move slow moving products. Though Amazon doesn’t always make it easy for you to find all of these deals. They’d much rather direct you to their better selling, higher profit margin products.
The hard part is finding these pages. Amazon doesn’t publicize them or even link to them directly. You have to manipulate Amazon’s URL to even be able to see all the pieces that are marked down on one web page. Without doing this you’d have to troll through the millions of web pages Amazon has to find all the deals.
Basically all of Amazons products are divided into categories. This provides a logical framework for the site and also helps categorize everything for users. However some geeky computer guys found out that you can plug in discount ranges into the category links to put all their best discounts on one page.
Let’s say for example you were looking for jewelry. Each category that Amazon has is represented by a node number. So if you go to amazon.com and click on the jewelry page you will find you are directed to this url:
http://www.amazon.com/jewelry-watches-engagement-rings-diamonds/b/ref=topnav_storetab_jw?ie=UTF8&node=3367581
The key element to finding the hidden discount page is the number after node=. In this case it is 3367581.
Your next step would then be placing the node number into this discount url. Let’s look at 75-95% off for this example:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?node=xxxxx&pct-off=75-99
To get to the hidden discount page you’d simply replace the xxxxx with the node number for the specific category. In the case of jewelry it will be:
3367581.
So simply plug that into the url like this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?node=3367581&pct-off=75-99
The &pct-off-75-99 tells the page what types of discounts in the category to look for. So this can be adjusted based on the type of deal you’ll looking for. In the jewelry category I’ve found some crazy deals like a 3.25 carat $10k diamond ring selling for $1900. The deals to be found are virtually endless.
While researching this article I also found out about hidden airline travel deals. Occasionally airlines will severely cut prices to popular domestic routes between two cities. Many of these price cuts appear without warning and aren’t advertised.
The story goes that an airline will slash prices to a common domestic route usually first thing in the morning and end the sale suddenly four to eight hours later. These brief, quiet sales are most common on trips that will be made within the following week or month. You can however get deals that allow travelers to use them up to three months later.
The trick to finding these deals is signing up for email alerts from companies that specialize in tracking these sorts of deals.
Have fun searching through all the discounts on these webpages!
Holy Moly… This is Fantastic!!
I had given up on Amazon and was really angry with them until I just read this article.
I’ve been an Amazon member/customer for years and was perfectly satisfied until they started playing games with the so called “discounts.” They would send me an email announcing to me that I had earned a discount for a purchase I had made. Three times it was for purchasing a gift card for someone. A couple other times they were just running some promotion and sent me an email telling me that I was being offered a percentage discount or a specific dollar amount off. Just the other day I wanted to buy some 3D Crest White Strips and the Crest web site gave me a coupon for $7 off if I made the purchase at Amazon.
Okay, I followed the coupon offer to the link at Amazon and I saw the same message that I have seen every single time they offered me a “discount” for any reason.. I got a rubber stamped message telling me that I was not qualified for this “discount.”
The three times that I purchased a gift card, I actually received an email from Amazon thanking me and telling me that in gratitude for my purchase, they were offering me a $5 discount on my next purchase. Whoopy! I was just thinking about going to their web site and purchasing some MP3 downloads, so that would be perfect.
When I got to the checkout, I couldn’t find any place to enter the discount, so I finally contacted Customer Service, who promised me that when I actually did the checkout, the discount would automatically be applied… Yeah, sure and I believe in the Tooth Fairy, too!
I never once got the promised discount on any occasion when they offered me one. NEVER! I even wrote a complaint and never got an answer… Then I wrote another complaint and told them that I would take my business to EBay…. No answer then either!
So, now that they are so big, they don’t care about us “little guys,” their “customers?” As a Life and Business Coach myself, my brain automatically starts trying to figure up how much a company spends to make one sale, and how much they lose when they blow a customer away. Of course, their “blow-away” has been EBay’s gain.
Now, thanks to you, Nick, I might be able to make up for all those discounts that were just empty bait to lure me to their checkout, where they grabbed my PayPal transfer and never applied the promised discount….I got a mouth full of hook and not even a swallow of the bait!
Next time I need something, I’ll be digging through the merchandise in their Bargain Basement. Tee Hee!
Coach Judi