I’d just never seen this specific flavor of bullshittery from them before. Encouraging sellers to keep prices below the shipping limit is one thing, but adding discounts artificially no matter what the actual seller prices their product at is a whole new level of making things worse for everyone involved.

Sellers have a lower likelihood of a non-Prime member buying their item, users don’t get free shipping.

As another user replied to you earlier, yeah, it’s substantially more expensive after shipping. Nearly 50% more, in fact, but in this specific instance I wasn’t actually planning on buying this specific bit set, the price and subsequent notice of the discount just caught my eye when it was in Amazon’s list of product recommendations.

Don’t ask me, I’ve been asking the same question myself 😅

The only things that had originally come to mind were my accounts on those stores being new (but who makes an account there then just lets it sit for like a week), me using virtual cards to avoid using the same payment info across different sites (but many other people do that with no issues), using my non-gmail email (but other people also do that with no issues), ad & JS canvas blocking (but as needanke mentioned earlier, they don’t seem to have problems), or possibly just something with my address itself making its way onto some shared-around list of addresses not to ship to for some reason, but none of these explanations really seem to make sense.

I’m genuinely just as stumped as you are.

I know, I only took this specific screenshot because it happened to show up as a recommendation within Amazon’s interface and I noticed the price and discount seemed odd. I intend to try buying it (or at least, a similar set made by iFixit) on their own site when I end up actually needing it.

I try to when I can, but I tend to have major difficulties doing so.

I tried Ebay, they restricted my account and said the only way for me to get it un-restricted was to buy a product from a limited set of brand-new partner suppliers (e.g. Logitech, HP, etc) that were all over $100, and nothing I actually needed.

I tried buying some chargers from Anker and they also restricted me and said they wouldn’t let me make a purchase because my email seemed suspicious (I don’t use Gmail), so I had to go back to Amazon and buy it there instead for practically the same price, even though it would have actually been cheaper on Anker’s own website since they had a discount code that would have worked for my order.

I bought something on Target because I’d been given a Target gift card, Target cancelled my order 3 times and made me contact customer service to remove an invisible hold on my account.

I frequently try checking third-party sites for the same products, and the prices are way higher (e.g. A product I plan on purchasing is $80 on the manufacturer’s site, and $58 on Amazon, with the price frequently dropping to $38) because Amazon literally mandates that the cheapest price must be on Amazon. Often times, these price differences are so drastic that I could end up paying double for the same product.

I also tend to get Amazon gift cards from relatives even though they already know I dislike using Amazon when I don’t have to, so it’s often somewhat unavoidable.

Don’t get me wrong, those are just the worst instances so far. I’ve bought quite a few items from elsewhere before without issues, it’s just that I tend to have the occasional issue that makes it practically impossible to buy elsewhere.

Believe me, I do my best to not have to spend money on Amazon, but it’s either so drastically more expensive that it’s simply not reasonable to buy elsewhere, or for various reasons I mentioned before, I’m not even capable of placing an order in the first place.