Following on from the safety shoes thread I was going to recommend some Mack workboots. Saw some locally and they seem really good quality.

Googled and some came up on Amazon, discounted from £98 to £28 for a UK 11.

So I bought them. They were an Amazon item and not a reseller.

Look back a couple of hours later and they are now back at £98.

How does that work?

Lightning deals. They do them a lot. Sell at a discount for a few hours or
Until they are sold out

Lightning deals.

I thought it would of said “lightning deal” on the page if this was the case?

Even haven’t sold out either just put the price up.

Its probably a way of managing stock levels and warehouse space – perhaps if theres something else more profitable or in demand you’d rather have on that rack a flash sale is the way to make the necessary space, but you only need to sell at that price until you’ve made the space you want.

Amazon (and some other online retailer) price variability can be extraordinary. If there’s something you know you’re going to need but there’s no particular urgency about buying it (walking boots getting near their end of life, that sort of thing) it’s well worth setting up an alert on CamelCamel or similar.

Even haven’t sold out either just put the price up.

That could be their system reacting to apparent demand. Easyjet’s ticketing used to do something similar.

I wonder if they noticed a flurry of web activity around them…..

Its mad, and hard to predict without the masses of data Amazon have, uk.camelcamelcamel.com lets you track it and watch the fun

They might have gotten new stock in, the one you got was from the last batch. You see this with clothes shoes on amazon all the time, like one size jacket is £30 and all the other may be £100

A lot of Amazon sellers use software based price matching, they automatically scan other sites to ensure they have the lowest price. So if / when another seller lowers their price Amazon seller will,do the same, if that other seller sells outbtheynprkce goes back up. FYI also common for websites to use cookies to detect if you return to a page having previously viewed it and often show you a higher price than the first time on the basis they guess you have checked elsewhere and the price must be the lowest.