If you use the credit card network not just once but twice -- once to process a purchase and then yet again to refund it -- you're using that infrastructure.
It makes sense you'd pay for its usage. If you drive to work on a toll road and then drive back home along the same toll road, you still have to pay the tolls even though you wound up in the same place at the end.
Sweet. How do I negotiate with Amazon again?
In reality, negotiation is a relic of a long gone era and flea markets. Buyer agency in general has mostly disappeared in modern transactions.
So how did you determine salary last time you were hired?
(I last negotiated a price in a retail store about 10 years ago - if you call that a long gone era then I feel rather old).
Source: I was director of digital marketing for a payments company a few years ago.
You very likely will find amazon is not willing to engage in much negotiation, unless you happen to have a unique offer. But nothing requires amazon to engage.
As a seller? You set up your own website and don’t use Amazon. There are literally thousands of mom and pop sellers that use Shopify and advertise on Facebook and Instagram
There is absolutely logic in pricing in terms of setting a pricing floor, which often comes from a combination of fixed and variable costs.
Of course you are right that there is flexibility above that, but again there's absolutely logic there as well in terms of price discrimination mechanisms.
None of this is just arbitrary. These companies put a lot of thought, and logic, into their pricing mechanisms. Get it exactly right and you make a lot of money, get it a little bit wrong and you go out of business.
Funny you should use that example. On toll roads you get charged in both directions, but I've never seen a toll bridge that had tolls in both directions. Usually the argument is that you really can't go any other way so the toll in one direction covers the cost of both trips.
But I actually think you're right here -- most people won't make the "return trip" so it makes sense to only charge people twice that do.
Here in the Bay Area all of our bridges only have tolls in one direction.
It seems kind of a waste from my perspective to have to do the traffic bottleneck in two directions.
Huh, I think I've only seen this once (the Tacoma Narrows Bridge). Other toll bridges I've driven have all had tolls in each direction, e.g., Ambassador and Blue Water Bridges to Canada, Lake Washington floating bridge. Maybe I need to start taking more bridges to nowhere!
