Amazon is always adjusting their prices, and sometimes those adjustments aren’t in your favor. When you throw an item in your cart and the price suddenly rises by five or ten bucks, that’s enough to make you look for it elsewhere, or maybe not buy the item at all if it wasn’t something that you needed. Yet there is a way to get Amazon to bring the price back down: ask nicely.

This isn’t a super-secret strategy, but you may not have thought to try it. The founding couple of Rather Be Shopping did, and they employed the strategy with a robot kitty that’s a popular toy this holiday season. You know the drill: they put the toy in their cart, and the price went up before they went to purchase. That’s when they logged on customer service chat.

The agent checked the price history and found that yes, the price had indeed risen in the last 24 hours. She offered an adjustment after the order was placed.

Like all tools in the consumer toolkit, we warn you not to abuse this one, especially as December continues and customer service lines get busier. Amazon calls it a “one-time exception” in this example, and even if they allow you to use it multiple times, save it for major price increases on big-ticket items.

Amazon Hack: How To Get the Lower Price After a Price Change [Rather-Be-Shopping]

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