tl;dr

Take a look at this screenshot of this listing on Amazon:

There are two key bits of information here:

“Price: £24.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK”

“All listed prices on applicable products sold by Amazon.co.uk now include the new, reduced VAT rate of 15%. This has been applied automatically to the price of your item so you don’t need to do a thing.”

Hmmm. So, yesterday, did this item sell for £25.53? Did it? Or have you, Amazon, in fact, swallowed the VAT increase and kept the price the same?

Lying gits. I’ve emailed them about this. They said this:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk with your concerns.

I understand that you are disappointed that the price of “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” did not decrease following the reduction of the UK VAT rate.  Amazon.co.uk has included the new rate for all products that are subject to the standard rate of VAT and this has resulted in the prices falling on hundreds of thousands of items.

Occasionally one of a number of factors that we use to determine price can cause a price to stay the same or rise, but expect to see price reductions across the website as a result of the new VAT rate.

We make every effort to keep abreast of the changes in the status of items, and we feel that having an on-line computerised catalogue allows us to update it more regularly. Publishers do, however, change the list prices of titles regularly and with so many titles in our catalogue there will unavoidably be a few instances where an item’s price may have changed without our knowing it.

Please accept our apologies for any disappointment. We will not be able to offer any further discount on “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” but I hope you will be able to take advantage of the many discounts we do
offer on your next visit to our store.

So that’s… no answer at all. Bah.

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