Price tracking systems like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel wouldn't work if they started doing this. I can verify that, when I get alerts, the price on Amazon is the same as the alert price.

This is the answer. I wanted to buy a pole saw and kept seeing different prices just throughout the day and later I noticed that it was from different sellers

Yeah I've definitely been caught off guard by the different sellers selling identical products before. Check the URL and see if the ID is the same, it probably won't be.

Yeah there's a few reasons why the offer that wins the buy box (the term for which merchants offer is shown to the customer prominently) and is complex, but I wouldn't consider it particularly sinister or designed to mislead. If one person has prime and the other doesn't, it might weight more towards a prime offer which may be more expensive, a price from a merchant may have changed, or gone out of stock.

I haven't seen any studies, I seem to remember there was some news reports many years ago.

I do know that I've stood in my living room, on the same wifi, and looked art the same item from Amazon on my phone and my brother in laws phone and seen different prices. But that's just another anecdote.

Amazon doesn't track users, but it does have various sellers selling the same items. The search results aren't always in the same order and sometimes the price on the item page is based on whichever seller has that item.

For example, I wanted a faux leather jacket. I found dozens of them in various sizes from different sellers. Changing the size on one page changed the seller entirely.

Amazon countered price tracking by introducing coupons that only apply at checkout. Some products only use coupons for discounting now.

Just be aware that these prices may not be the true lows.

The price must flow!

If they detect that you're using a 19 year old ThinkPad with Arch linux, they aggressively increase the price on thigh-high rainbow socks.

changing my user agent to Brave so everyone thinks I lost my money to scams

Another comment pointed out that apparently amazon fighting this with coupon system

Use Firefox and max out all of its security settings. When you do this, the fingerprint protection is so good that not even Google can ID my PC anymore. I have to pull out my phone and confirm it's me every time I log in.

Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it's rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50

Neither of us has prime

What does that mean?

What is cross ship?

I need to try with my user agent set to a Chromebook. Maybe I'll even get a discount.

You're paying for an ad blocker? uBlock origin is free and fully featured.

I pay for Mullvad VPN, that’s €60/yr ($65)

I know it’s much but I prefer mailing them a letter with the money to stay anonymous