Amazon has launched a new feature called ‘Auto Buy‘ (our affiliate link). This lets you set a price alert for items items Fulfilled by Amazon and if it falls below that price Amazon will automatically purchase the item using your default payment method. Promotional discounts and coupons cannot be used when using auto buy and currently only available to Prime members.
I can definitely see the use for this, I can also see Amazon allowing merchants to sell items at a discounted price exclusively to users with an auto buy price set (e.g. sell to everybody with an auto-buy of more than $40 without actually discounting the price on the product page). I feel like there needs to be some sort of price protection to ensure merchants don’t just lower the price incrementally to trigger auto buy purchases at the highest possible price point.
I’d recommend not using this feature yet, because if Amazon wants to really push it I expect we will see some promotions for using it for the first time in the future.
