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When my wife and I shop together, that typically means that she sends me a link to buy something on Amazon. That was also the case with these pull ups that she wanted me to order for our two-year-old.
I ordered them on Amazon and was slightly surprised when a box from Walmart arrived. At first I thought maybe Walmart was also now shipping through Amazon. But according to a Recode article some online retailers offer a product on one site for one price and buy it on another for a cheaper price and then ship it to you directly. You can read that article here.
That article also said that this technique is against Amazon rules. Now, I went to Walmart.com to see if I could find the same product on their site. I couldn’t. And I won’t drive to the local store to see if they have it just to see if I should be upset.
My wife and I talked about the situation as well and her response was “and I wanted those exact ones.” Apparently they are hard to find.
So was I cheated and charged an unfair price? I don’t think so – or even know. I couldn’t even tell what the price on Walmart.com was. The price seemed reasonable to us and we got what we were looking for and didn’t find anywhere else. I might feel differently if I had to return the order for one reason or another. Who would I even send it to? Walmart?
The bottom line is we got what we wanted and paid what appeared to be a reasonable price.
I choose my story in this case to be inquisitive (why?) and being okay (not upset) because we got what we needed. And also, that I wasn’t sent to drive across town to Walmart and buy the same item after searching for it in-store
That was my mindset and then more details came to light …
As you can see in the picture below, the packaging is off. Instead of getting two boxes with 52 pull-ups we received one with 66 and one with 48.
I didn’t even notice until my wife told me that she was surprised that they came in different boxes. So I started inquiring some more and found the prices for those pull up counts on the Walmart site. Here they are and here is exactly what we received:
So basically I paid $80 for something this seller bought on Walmart for $40. As you might imagine I’m not so happy about my deal after all.
I went back to the order information page on Amazon and there’s really no way to be able to tell that it was going to come from Walmart.
I did drop a note to the seller about it to see what their thoughts are and I am planning on following up with Amazon.