Amazon price vs Eshop price

So I just picked up a used 3DS and have no games, so I was shopping around:

Mario Kart 7 - $29.99 on Amazon, $39.99 on the E-shop

Super Mario 3D Land - $29.99 on Amazon, $39.99 on the E-shop

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Shadow Wars - $14.69 on Amazon,$29.99 on the E-shop

Whats the deal with these pricing differences?

EDIT: and if I buy a the cart is there a way to install the game onto the 3DS so I don't have to swap carts around?

Amazon is allowed to set their own price discounts; they typically discount older games as a means to clear out inventory to make way for newer products. Publishers and developers are allowed to set their own prices on the eShop and can make adjustments for special offers or permanent price cuts as desired. Obviously, those games must still be selling well enough for the original retail price on the eShop to make it worth keeping at that price point.

Games cannot be installed off of the physical cards onto the 3DS. If you own both the physical version of a game like Fire Emblem and later purchase the downloadable version, you can transfer your save data from the physical version to the download version.

Buy carts . Own a physical copy of your games until Nintendo finally learns what it means to be in the "current" generation of digital content management. Even then own a physical copy. Also Nintendo will rarely if ever discount their games. Only time they drop MSRP value is when they go to the Classics or whatever format that the Wii games did. Why discount your games when you know people will buy it for full price 5 years after its release?

I'll take your $39.99 and raise you to $60.76.

Why?

Because that's how much £39.99 currently is in USD and how much the UK estore charges and is the reason I will not purchase anything that has a physical release on the estore.

Just to make this an equal opportunity bitching, I'll point out the amazing £59.99 ($91) Sony asks for titles like Crysis 3.

It is an absolutely insane state of affairs, and yet I am constantly amazed that people willingly pay this.

No, that's the one advantage to buying digital games. You're able to have something like Animal Crossing on the system, so it can be played any time without the cart.

Still not particularly worth it, but at least worth considering for certain games.

@nezza: Yeah, the price of new games on PSN is bizarre. It's cheaper for them to sell a game digitally than have a physical copy with box and all that, yet they charge more. Surely must be a publisher thing though as I see a lot of EA and Ubisoft games at £59.99

PSN has way better sales than 3DS or Xbox live though. You'll often find fairly recent games at 50% off and the 'free' PS+ games selection has been fantastic lately.

@benny: Mmm, it might be cheaper but it might not be. They're not the ones who have to deal with floor space issues in the retail environment. And the cost of printing and shipping the games out is drastically reduced when you use business math on it, what with distributed costs among however many they make at any one time and how many they ship at one time. The ones who are hurting for money are the DCs and then the retail stores trying to sell them.

But PSN is basically free margins, minus still having to pay royalties to Sony, for them so they won't drop it right off the bat. They'd lose money because more people would theoretically buy off the PSN store instead of the more expensive copies in brick and mortars/Amazon. The only issue I see is the reluctance of non first party developers when it comes to dropping the price of older PSN games after so many years of being out. While places like Amazon or Target (kind of a bad example because they just leave 5 year old games sitting in their electronics back stock, I actually saw a non Greatest Hits FF13 at my old store. Kind of shocking really. Not to mention them trying to sell Other M for 50 dollars and X-Men Destiny for 59.99) or Gamestop have to lower prices to get rid of stock for floor space.

Such a conundrum.