It may be a little early for Christmas shopping, but if you’re into books by authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, you may be able to benefit from a price war by three of the biggest eCommerce book sellers on the planet. About two weeks ago, Amazon and Wal-mart started selling a number of bestsellers at way below market price. In marketing terms, it’s called a loss-leader…selling a much sought-after product at a steep discount to attract customers who will hopefully buy other stuff while they’re poking around on your website.

In this case though, the deals were so good that the online retailers realized they were shooting themselves in the foot. The deal affected ten books bound for the bestseller list in the holiday shopping season. Hardcover copies of these books, that would normally retail for anywhere from $25-$35 each, were on sale for as low as $8.98. Since they were selling the books at below-wholesale price, small book sellers ran in and scooped up multiple copies so they could re-sell them in their own stores.

Now, two weeks after the sale started, the big retailers realized what was going on, and have just placed a limit on the number of copies each customer can purchase. Now you can purchase anywhere from 2-5 copies, depending on the retailer and the book; plenty enough for your gift list, but not enough for a smaller retailer looking to cash in on the re-sale bonanza. As usually happens when Amazon goes head-to-head with smaller book-stores, you had to know that, sooner or later, Amazon would make sure the little guy couldn’t scratch out any sort of advantage.

Tags: Amazon, eComm, eCommerce, Wal-Mart

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