Pricing on a Count Basie CD

Long story short... going through stacks of CDs looking for anything that might be unusually rare. I see Count Basie- Sophisticated Swing.
I look on Amazon and see only third party sellers pricing from $1243.26 to $4858.18. I thought, "Damn! What did I find?!"
Then I looked on Discogs... starting at $3.36.
What the ever-loving #%&@ ?

 

I'd bet if you looked at other items that seller has up for sale you are going to find a bunch of other items that are priced that way. They're hoping some one hits the listing and figures that must be the going rate without looking any further.

 

At first I thought, "But there's three different listings. " Then I checked... ask the same seller.

 

A book dealer I know, claimed that the listings are worded to attract bots. That sounds unlikely, but who knows.

 

Google “bookjacking”. The same thing applies to CDs. The short version is that unscrupulous sellers will used automated tools to scan for gaps in the market & list CDs at inflated prices. They don’t own any stock of the CDs they list. When they receive an order, they’ll purchase the CD from another seller (at a much lower price) & instruct them to drop ship the CD to the buyer.

A variant on this is that they play around with the price, sometime jacking up the price to ridiculous levels to make them appear rarer than they are. All the book/CDjackers monitor other prices & so they impact each other. It’s a very weird form of market manipulation that Amazon etc could stamp out if they wanted to.

 

I used to spend a lot of time on the old Amazon marketplace uk selers forums - at one point there were (mostly book) sellers using price matching software that would either glitch and accidentally reprice things to stupidly high prices or accidentally match one of the dropshipper chancers. Lots of angry/confused/upset sellers as a result. Sometimes UK cds go up to stupid prices for what they are and when you look at all the sellers it turns out to be because the highest priced seller is somebody in Japan selling it back to England as a (double) import.

 

If only people used their minds for good instead evil.

Thanks for the insights.