Buyer Beware: Multiple pricing for the same book at bookdepository

7:38 am 1 February 2014

I order the majority of my books from BookDepository. They have the lowest prices I can get here in AU and they'll ship for free, AND they allow pre-orders. That last one is the deal breaker at the moment. I hate buying from anyone owned by Amazon, but wordery.com and kennys.ie don't offer pre-ordering capabilities (yet).

Anyway, while placing my order for books to be published in April, I tacked on a book on preserving I've heard great things about called Put 'Em Up. It was priced at $26 but I thought it was a hardcover. After placing the order, I realised it's a paperback and that's expensive. So I went over to Booko.com.au: it's a price comparison website for books: you put in the title or ISBN and it does a worldwide search and lists where you can buy the book for the cheapest price, in descending order, including shipping costs. And guess what? The cheapest place to buy the book is at BookDepository.com - FOR $20 bucks!!!

I thought, must be a different edition. So I grabbed the ISBN of the $20 book and compared it to the ISBN of the book I bought. Exact same book. I took screenshots:

So I send an email to customer service, including the URL's to both pages (they do differ) and mentioned the price difference. The response I got this morning:

I have looked at both websites and the price appears to be the same.

It Might just be that the price has gone down since you placed your order. Sadly we are unable to offer retrospective refunds once an order has been placed and the sale price agreed between ourselves and the customer. However, orders can be cancelled as long as they have not yet been dispatched.

Except that the prices HAVEN'T changed. I checked as soon as I got her email and both pages still show the differing prices.

So, I sorta was angry and was a bit snippy in the email, when looking back on her response it wasn't really called for -- I'm happy to have them cancel the whole order and I'll re-order the books with the cheaper book selected.

But I thought I'd let everyone know - if you have access to a book price comparison site like booko.com.au (I don't know if it works for buyers outside AU) it might be worth the extra time to use it if you use BookDepository.com for your book purchases.