It is and it really sucks.
>By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google.
If that's what they actually did all the time, you'd be right. However, pretty much all the time (except in the past few hours), Amazon does not do that.
All you need to do to confirm that is a web search. What's more, if that were the case, sites like CamelCamelCamel[0] couldn't exist. Yet they do.
The discussion here was about issues that Amazon was having over the past four hours or so.
Amazon is and does objectionable things all the time. If you wish to dump on Amazon, more power to you.
But if you're going to do so, why not do it based on actual issues and not ones you made up based on what appears to be a back end outage (which seems to be resolved now, with prices, as is normal, prominently displayed on product pages ) at Amazon over the past few hours?
Cannot place an order to ship (!)
Once I worked out what I wanted to purchase, clicking the "Proceed to Checkout " button returns a "Sorry, something went wrong" error.
So not only are there issues with getting prices, one (at least me) can't even buy what they want.
It's not a huge deal (for me at least). Hopefully it will be resolved soon.