Online retail giant Amazon, which recently unveiled plans to open more brick-and-mortar stores, has ended its price protection policy without fanfare, a move that could alienate some of the company's most loyal customers.

Customers who shop through Amazon's massive catalog are offered competitive prices, and in some instances, the price of a product would drop just after a customer buys it. When such thing happens, customers are able to request for Amazon to refund the difference between the price that they paid for and the new price of the product within seven days from the date of the transaction.

However, this price match refund is apparently no longer being offered by Amazon since earlier in May for all products, except for TVs.

The cancellation of the policy was pointed out by price-tracking companies and users on the online forum Reddit.

There were several posts on the associated thread on the online forum, as some Redditors recently tried to request for a price adjustment refund. Not only were their requests blocked, but it seems that Amazon agents were instructed to treat the cancelled policy as if it had never existed in the first place.

"If they want to change their policy that's fine, it's their business. But to pretend like the last 3 years of me getting price adjustments was just my imagination really makes me angry. They are treating their customers like they are idiots," wrote Redditor jrr6415sun.

The statements that infuriated Redditors were echoed by Julie Law, a spokeswoman for Amazon who claimed that the policy was always only limited to TVs and those customers who received refunds for other kinds of products were granted exceptions to the rule.

The decision to cancel the seemingly popular refund policy could have something to do with the increasing number of startups, which track prices on Amazon and then request refunds for users when possible.

According to law, Amazon takes the security of its customers very seriously and so would like them to not share their account information and credentials to anyone else, including price-drop startups.