Okay, so we all know that Amazon has this nice little 30 day post-order price-drop guarantee, right? You don't? Well, you probably can't blame them for not going out of their way to advertise the fact, but if you do a little digging on their help pages you will find it here. In a nutshell, if you order anything from Amazon (that is sold by Amazon, not a third-party vendor), and the price drops within 30 days of your purchase, you are entitled to a refund of the difference.
All you have to do is ask them. Unfortunately this is not all that easy to do either (again, can't really blame them for trying to hang onto their profits, they are a business not a charity after all). But even if you can't figure out how to contact them about it online, you can call their customer service at 1-866-216-1072 (use extension 7 to get a human) and ask them about it (have your order number handy). The really cool thing about it is that if the price drops again in the 30 day period, you can request another refund even if you already got one, and they'll give you back the difference between the new low price and the one you already acted on.
The only real hassle is that you have to keep tracking the prices for 30 days so you'll know when to request a refund. But there's good news for you here too. I've found this cool little site called Refund Please that will keep track of your items for you and send you an email if they detect a price drop on Amazon. All you have to do is provide the item number, the price you paid, the date the order was processed (that's when Amazon charges you), and an email address at which they can notify you.
Today, I got a notification from Refund Please that an item I ordered from Amazon last Friday is now selling for $25 less than what I paid for it (no, it's not body armor). I haven't even received the item yet, but I went ahead and requested my refund from Amazon anyway. They processed it with no fuss and informed me that I should be seeing the credit to my account within the next 3 to 5 business days. Now that's what I call customer service (too bad they hide this stuff under their rug though).
But Refund Please just ROCKS! I certainly won't be buying anything else from Amazon without registering it over there. You just never know when something you already ordered might end up on sale, and these guys make it simple to track.
