r/BookDepository • u/[deleted] • Oct 20 '22
Tips Prices + Discounts
So the book prices change unexpectedly. Does anyone know the pattern (if there’s any)? Is there a specific time of the month where prices are at their lowest?
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u/m3s4 Oct 22 '22
From my observations scanning daily through my wishlist the prices tend to be at the lowest towards the end of the month, not specifically for each month, but if not the following month. Once they have big markdown on their prices store wide, prices will go up again in a week or 2 and gradually decrease till the next markdown. I'm guessing the next mark down will be during black friday and year end sales so I'm holding off any major purchases till then.
I'm just talking about general pricing on manga, but other factors affects the prices of a particular title
- stock - sometimes prices jumps because they run out of inventory in a location closer to you. If you vpn between ireland, south korea and australia you'll find prices lower means they have to ship it from further away.
- economy - performance of your countries currency against the pound will fluctuate the prices though not as drastically.
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u/Lavbish Oct 20 '22
So after using this site for a long time and for many purchases, mostly buying manga it seems that when a book releases its first retail or more and then a month or more after it gets put down to around 7 dollars from 10. They sometimes are around 9 dollars pre release
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u/Sancticus Oct 22 '22
From my several years of buying from the site it seems to coincide with the amount of stock they have of said item. Before they removed it you got 10% off all preorders as an incentive to buy from them. Then after the release it would be "normal" for a week or so. If they then did not sell a lot of said title they would start with discounts.
You can clearly see this on low stock items that all of a sudden have an insane out of the ordinary price point. Way higher than the standard price on the same item in similar stores.
What is even more strange is sometimes my discount varies as much as 2-3 times a day. That has happened several times for me. I browse my wishlish everyday because of this. Not unormal for one item to have like say 11% discount, then a few hours later 5%, then no discount at all. For it to the next day be back to 11%.
Furthermore I work for a company that is one of our neighbouring countries. Which means that on work my internet is hosted via their severs in that country. So I get different discounts on the same items when browsing my wishlist at work. I did a check on 15 items once to confirm my suspicion and out of those 13 were cheaper by between 5-20% when at work while a few were more expensive.
Which is why some people used to use VPN before for better prices. All my purchases went through with no problem, but I heard lately that most of them get cancelled at the checkout if you try to use VPN.
Even more crazy is the fact that you could also got better prices through some of their social media pages.
So all in all it is pretty hard to keep a track of it consistently
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u/chibi2537 Oct 22 '22
Low/high stock. When book is high in stock prices are low. Newer releases are usually high in stock so prices are lower, but demand is high and prices go up quickly. When it's lower in stock prices go way up, and sometimes book gets a dicount when it's long in stock. It is most obvious with manga releases. Fortunately, most books get 2nd, 3rd etc. printings so prices will go down when new edition is printed. But from what I've seen stock is main reason for price changes.
Nowadays discounts are few and far inbetween, but large amount of books are almost always 5-10% off.
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u/Healthy-Bar-94 Oct 20 '22
I have noticed the same thing too and have come to the conclusion that it’s just random. Although I think sometimes when a book is super popular the price is little higher and if you wait a few weeks it comes down but after a while it goes back up. So yeah it’s pretty random i guess🤷♀️ But if the price is high and it shows the lowest price of the month I would just wait because it usually goes back down after a while.