Amazon Outlet

We love Amazon as much as the next guy—and have the credit-card bills to prove it—but its Outlet section leaves us scratching our heads. As far as we know, an outlet is a place where vendors offer older goods at low prices. Yet Amazon seems to include a lot of new products—at new-product prices—in its Outlet inventory. We found the very recent PS2 game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, selling for $47.88—the same price it sells for in Amazon's regular video-game store. This can be confusing.

In many outlet categories, Amazon steers you to its third-party Marketplace sellers, who offer old goods at relatively high prices—again, not really our idea of an outlet. This can lead to results that would be comical if they weren't potentially costly. One Outlet seller offered a refurbished Sony notebook PC for $1,849—exactly $400 more than Amazon was selling it for new, after rebate, in its own electronics store. There were some good deals here, but you have to hunt through a lot of mediocre (and worse) deals to find them.

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