A few pens at 20% off on Amazon

[lascosas]

https://www.amazon.com/promotion/psp/A2TX4XO0NIV6P2?ref=clp_external&redirectAsin=B0C92B8YRR&redirectMerchantId=ATVPDKIKX0DER&ref=cxcw_clp_af_A2TX4XO0NIV6P2&source=dp_cxcw

 

This is an example.  With the 20% discount, it is $25.14.  Most places are selling it for $80.  You can only apply the 20% on one item per order.  If you order 2 for example. it will pro-rate the 20% among items.  To get the full 20% on multiple items, just order one at a time.

 

[inkstainedruth]

Are they being sold directly by Amazon?  Or coming from some 3rd party vendor?  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[lascosas]

Directly.  This is an Amazon sale, one of many that will appear in the next couple of weeks.  Here are today's full list of these coupons

https://www.amazon.com/Coupons/b?node=2231352011

[RedPie]

Thanks for pointing that out @lascosas

[Misfit]

I already have that Blue Mountains pen. That price is excellent. I recommend that pen. It’s quite lovely.

[Misfit]

Ugh. I was trying to find coupons. I selected office and school. It’s quite a slog. 
 

Edit: once I looked up Monteverde, and found one with a coupon, that led to the rest.  I used to want the Monteverde Prima in red swirl. It isn’t one with a coupon, but the price is very good I’d say. 

Edited December 21, 2023 by Misfit

[SLinkster]

I found a blue Kaco Sky 2 with cartridges and a converter for $3.50 - 50% off. 

[lascosas]

I also see no logic in how one searches for these coupons.  I just stumbled on one which had a link to supposedly all of the 20% off fountain pens.

[inkstainedruth]

I'll admit that Amazon is not the first place I'd look for buying a fountain pen.  There are enough e-sellers and B&M stores that I've learned about over the years, from being on FPN for more than a decade....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

edited for typos

[lascosas]

I would say it depends on what you are looking for.

[inkstainedruth]

Well, I'm often looking for vintage or semi-vintage pens, so I'm more likely to scope out eBay.  And having had bad experiences with 3rd party vendors on Amazon (as well as a bad experience a few years ago with a couple of CDs purchase directly FROM Amazon where they had some guy making deliveries in his car and he apparently never heard of GPS, and was at the OTHER end of the main road I live off of so of COURSE couldn't find my street -- let ALONE my house) it's not my first choice.  And as I said to the woman on the phone in Amazon's CS department, their local warehouse is just a few miles from my house, in an industrial park across the river from the town I live in....  I know because I've been PAST it....   (At least I was comped by Amazon for the hassle, and was able to use that to buy prizes for a sort of scavenger hunt I got asked to run the following year....)

Honestly, though, any more, even with books or music, I'm more likely to check the Barnes & Noble website FIRST....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Janeite]

When I click on "Shop items" by the 20% off, it shows a list with more than 500 items.  There is a search box to look within the results, and there are more than 200 results that contain "fountain."  Most of the items are Monteverde or Conklin, but I saw a Pilot Custom 74, a Pelikan Souveran M605, a Pelikan M205, some Private Reserve ink, some Crosses, and Xezos.

[inkstainedruth]

Not familiar with the last brand you mentioned.  I have a couple of Monteverde Stratas (a friend gave me one that she had gotten from one of the Truphae random package orders) and I recently got the second one to be able to try an Omniflex nib.

I don't have that particular Pilot model, but have a couple of Metropolitans and a couple of the Decimos (and gave my husband a used Vanishing Point I found in an antiques and collectibles store for about a third of the price of a new one).  I also have an older model, A Pilot Saturn (possibly made for the Korean market) and picked up a Falcon a few years ago when they made a couple of colors exclusively for the US market.  Oh and a couple of the Pilot Varsities, but they ran out of ink too fast....  Which is too bad, because the ink colors were WONDERFUL (I have a blue one and a purple one).

Have a few Cross pens (if I could find a couple of other colors of the Solos -- particularly if they had different nibs from the two I have -- I'd buy them in a heartbeat); the Verve?  Ehhhh... not so much.  But only paid a buck for it in a place that's like Construction Junction but specifically for arts & crafts stuff.  And recently got a Cross Adventura in trade for a pen that turned out to be basically a parts pen (some prior owner had apparently tried to turn a Sheaffer Snorkel into a cartridge/converter pen ).  I have a few Pelikans in the M200/M205 size, and one of the M600 LE colors (Violet and White) from a few years ago, but don't use it much: when the pen came it looked as if it had literally fallen off the back of a truck, and the cap has cracks in it now (and are really obvious because I had had Edelstein Tanzanite in it... ).  I had wanted one of the Pink and White ones when they came out, but they were just too pricy (and even MORE expensive now) -- and for some reason the Violet and White wasn't as heavy (or else my weight tolerance threshold is higher than it used to be; or BOTH) than I remembered the M600 Pink and White being, when holding one at a pen show a number of years ago....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Janeite]

Your experience with fountain pens shows!  I wasn't familiar with Xezos either, but didn't know if that was a Chinese brand that I hadn't heard about yet.  I've seen a good price (relatively speaking) on the Apatite Pelikan M205, but it still doesn't strike me as being "worth" that much to me yet.  Whether it becomes "worth" it enough to indulge my curiosity in what makes everyone interested, time will tell.  But I guess if I'm spending triple digits on a pen, I want it to look special, and that Pelikan doesn't look special enough to me. 

 

But I listed out the different offerings for the 20% off in case anyone was interested in any of those models.

[Janeite]

The Waterman Expert FP is 47% off at Amazon, sold by Amazon (regularly $125, on sale for $65.78) and a 50mL bottle of Waterman's Intense Black ink is 48% off, for $7.58.  Those were the biggest highlights that I saw for FPs, but there could be others in their deals section.

[OCArt]

@JaneiteAs an example of how Amazon works I searched for the Waterman Expert and didn't find it for sale using my normal browser. Then went into "private browsing mode" and there was the sale price. Sneaky.

[Janeite]

13 hours ago, OCArt said:

As an example of how Amazon works I searched for the Waterman Expert and didn't find it for sale using my normal browser. Then went into "private browsing mode" and there was the sale price. Sneaky.

That is very interesting and very sneaky.  Thanks for sharing!

[inkstainedruth]

It also sounds very strange....  But then, my opinion of Amazon isn't that high to begin with.  Is it something you can order directly from Amazon, or it coming from a 3rd-party seller?  And if the latter, I'd be checking out the vendor's feedback ratings fairly carefully, after a bad experience -- and the seller turned out to be about an hour away from me, in the next county!  But didn't follow instructions (or, apparently pass those instructions on to the delivery service, which was DHL -- I suspect that the seller's claims that DHL "doesn't provide tracking" REALLY meant "We ordered the same CD from the slightly cheaper guy in Germany but don't want you to know that...."  But also of course explains why it took so long to GET the CD....  (Seriously, I got a pen from a vendor in Japan on eBay that took less time, and THAT seller did not lose his 100% positive feedback rating in ANY way, shape, or form -- and if the seller had something else I wanted?  I wouldn't HESITATE to order from that seller again.  The record/CD/DVD place in the next county?  I think I got them kicked OFF Amazon (boo hoo -- no, that's actually TOTAL sarcasm...).

Of course I've also had problems buying directly FROM Amazon (part of the issue seemed to be that they were using a 3rd party making deliveries by car, and not in an Amazon vehicle), and was sort of surprised at one point a couple of years ago that ordering something from a 3rd party seller through Amazon was going to be LESS expensive than ordering directly from the seller -- and of course *I'm* thinking "What's wrong with this picture? Because this makes NO intuitive sense WHATSOEVER!"  The fact that bypassing the middleman (Amazon) was going to be cheaper?  There was definitely something that was NOT adding up -- and I ended up ordering from another vendor entirely.  After dealing with SEVERAL different people in a chat window who didn't seem to understand the issue AT ALL (let alone the English language).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth