Comment Re:Sometimes sellers do truly ask for 1 cent (Score 1) 138
Amazon UK lists the cheapest total price including shipping, and is even clever enough to know if you get Prime discounts and take them into account when ranking offers. I'm surprised the US site doesn't do it.
The reason some items get down to the penny level is that sellers use software to automatically set prices at or a little lower than the lowest offer on that item. They put in their fixed shipping cost and let the software set the sale price. They will often have thousands, or even tens of thousands of items so individually pricing them is out of the question, and they are more concerned with turnover so are happy to set a minimum of 1p and maybe make a little on shipping. Being cheapest gets them the sale and the churn without having to carefully figure out which items are valuable and which are not.
That also means that sometimes rare items will be extremely expensive, where as your local used book/CD shop might have them cheap because they just price all paperbacks/textbooks/albums the same.