No one would start intentionally shopping for a phone priced that high just by looking at this ad. It has to be a more literal clickbait.
UPDATE: I did not consider the currency. The number of responses mentioning currency tells me that’s what I overlooked. I am no longer even mildly infuriated and am therfore a liar 😅
Lots of vendors set their prices algorithmically… So like when competitors raise their prices or demand seems high for some reason or something, the price will auto-adjust to theoretically maximize profits. The algorithms are often pretty dumb.
So sometimes when you see something like this, you’re witnessing a dynamic pricing algorithm spiraling out of control because it wasn’t implemented very well, and nobody’s paying attention.
The other side of this I’ve seen is vendors setting the price to really high levels when out of stock. I’ve heard this explained as “the algorithm will punish you” for going out of stock and “if someone places an order, you can always scalp one”
Oh interesting-- Yeah gaming the recommendation/search algorithms is another, related explanation. Like I know someone with an Etsy store who says that various things, like running out of stock or putting your store in “vacation mode” will hurt your store’s visibility, so people find ways to game it. Totally makes sense that the same kind of thing would be going on on Amazon.
Weird that they’d allocate ad spend at the same time that they were out of stock, but like I said, the algorithms are pretty coarse and probably just not that coordinated.
That is much more reasonable, one of a couple possibilities I’m now seeing.