How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All (theatlantic.com) 251
Thelasko shares an excerpt from a report via The Atlantic, which describes how price discrimination is used in online shopping and how businesses like Amazon try to extract consumer surplus: Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer. We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. "It's most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price," Guru Hariharan explained, after I had sketched the pattern on a whiteboard. The right price -- the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets -- has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It's also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price -- and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)
Oh noes (Score:5, Funny)
"Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer."
You mean they want your money and will do anything to get it? Shocking, simply shocking.
Re:Oh noes (Score:5, Insightful)
but should you pay more simply because you're using an iphone connected to verizon's cellular data network vs someone using windows 7 on a slow-as-snails pacbell dsl line?
or pay more because you browsed the same item yesterday but didn't buy it at the lower price.. so now they're saying "fuck you, haha, the price is higher now, bitch. but you're back so that says you really want this stupid thing anyway". but if you went there on a different device, perhaps not even changing your provider.. and the lower price is still there.
or..
pay more because third-party database links tell the site you're an affluent white male living in the bay area?
pay more because those same databases tell the site you're gay or transgender, saving the lower prices for straight, white and married?
this isn't fiction. amazon and the like CAN and DO link what they do already know from you with other databases from others, even public records, social media and the web. looking for anything and everything about you. they'll even siphon off your credit history and rating, too, because you fell for their branded credit card or store credit. companies like this know more about you than your spouse, than your family.. and they probably even know things about you that you have forgotten, or wish you had.
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Re:Oh noes (Score:5, Interesting)
When you give up your right to check the Internet to find out what their competitors are shopping then I'll agree we should fight their ability to investigate you when setting pricing.
Re: Oh noes (Score:2)
No. The parent is saying that prices will be individual specific. Price watch sites won't help with that.
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The parent is saying that prices will be individual specific. Price watch sites won't help with that.
They might. If the refer link is from a price watch site, then an online merchant could deduce that you are a price sensitive shopper willing to work to find a bargain, and thus offer you a good price to make the sale.
Free advice: Never shop online with a Mac, and especially not with Safari as your browser.
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The parent is saying that prices will be individual specific. Price watch sites won't help with that.
They might. If the refer link is from a price watch site, then an online merchant could deduce that you are a price sensitive shopper willing to work to find a bargain, and thus offer you a good price to make the sale.
Free advice: Never shop online with a Mac, and especially not with Safari as your browser.
Okay, I'll bite - why not?
Looks like Slashdot's new look is getting us down to 4 or 5 words per line.
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Now this takes a couple extra minutes. If the convenience of not price shopping appeals to a person, then they pick one vendor and pay what they are told to pay.
This ain't rocket surgury.
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Or it could be how it used to be, and your local retailer knowing you had no alternatives just fucked you every chance they got... you can also use sites that watch prices of items to help you get the lowest rate.
In the good old days, you had to drive out of town to get around this problem. Today you fire up your VPN.
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MULTIPLE local retailers competing with one another on selection, price, location and service.
And all of them paying brick-and-mortar overhead. Competition has evolved, but we've gotten more efficient at getting products to the customer.
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"how it used to be" was actually pretty great -- MULTIPLE local retailers competing with one another on selection, price, location and service. only the smallest of towns didn't have that.. but the next, bigger, town over, where most people shopped for most things, did.
You forgot to add the part where the different businesses started fixing prices.
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You mean they want your money and will do anything to get it?
Not "anything". They will sell you an item you want. They will make it easy to buy and deliver it promptly and some of them will make it easy to return if you have a problem.
You don't have to fall for their diabolical schemes though. Don't buy that stuff. Only use items you find in dumpsters or on the side of the road.
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No they are NOT. At least not globally.
Take Australia as an example. Adobe software prices are any old MULTIPLE of US prices in a take it or leave it. SAP, Oracle and Microsoft software also have egregious pricing.
US Pharmaceuticals. I like the one where the cancer drug company destroyed stocks so it could and DID charge more , possibly 4000% more.
Maybe Spain will get India to supply directly, citing public health concerns.
Lastly the companies are not looking at last sale age profiles. When I get royally fe
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"Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer."
You mean they want your money and will do anything to get it? Shocking, simply shocking.
How about a train ride for ten grand?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e... [bbc.co.uk]
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Screw that, I'll build my own traincar.. with blackjack... and hookers, on second thought, screw the taincar.
Re: Oh noes (Score:3)
It just seems a slight variant on selling practices in capitalism that's been going on since Jarkal was offering those slightly off figs at half price in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago. Supply and demand, fluctuations in market price and consumer buzz have always resulted in "sale prices" being the highest out there. Sure, being attached to the Internet can leave you more prone to targetted advertising, but it also let's you trivially source competitor's prices. In the end, nothing has changed excep
Re: Oh noes (Score:2)
>Guru Hariharan
Who the fick is Guru Hariharan?
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More like they're looking hard to find a way to slam the invisible hand in a piano. The result is a less healthy market and inability to properly do price comparison.
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More amusing is when they don't actually own the product and have the price just a little bit higher than other vendors in the hope of making a little cash with no stock.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/bl... [michaeleisen.org]
Blue light specials... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because brick and mortar stores have never had flash sales and temporary price reductions people would literally have to run across the store to take advantage of. And Home Shopping Network, QVC, etc, never reduced prices on things at different times of the day or when inventory didn't sell as expected.
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As bad as these things are, nothing is as evil as infomercials. I'm pretty sure Amazon has never taken the fuel out of a 5 dollar barbeque lighter and then sold it for 50 dollars as an 'electric muscle stimulator'.
Yes, that shit really happened, the guy who did it was Billy Blank's business partner who also helped him do the infomercials for Tai Bo.
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Yeah, because brick and mortar stores have never had flash sales and temporary price reductions people would literally have to run across the store to take advantage of. And Home Shopping Network, QVC, etc, never reduced prices on things at different times of the day or when inventory didn't sell as expected.
Or put higher priced "regular price" stickers on items during a sale.
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And using computers to automate the entire system allows that system to happen so fast and frequently that it totally changes the nature of the interaction. Consider the difference between assigning a cop to patrol an area and look for crimes (/. approved) and putting up the ring of London to spy on everyone (/. creepy).
extract the most profit (Score:2)
Online ? Authors never shopped in real life (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I hate to tell you, but stores in Beverly Hills charge more than they do in Compton for the exact same product.
And their are these things called "sales" and "coupons" to differentiate pricing even at the same store.
Yes, online makes it a bit more obvious, and yes, smart people can kill the cookies that are more likely to raise your price than reduce it (they assume no cookie = new customer, so they offer lower prices).
Study should be redone, comparing price differential online with those off-line.
Re:Online ? Authors never shopped in real life (Score:5, Interesting)
This. Also, standardized pricing is a relatively new phenomenon as far as global history is concerned and even today is mostly true of mass market items only. If you live(d) in a bartering society merchants would absolutely sell you the same thing at different prices different times of the day, etc. Furthermore, in any sort of person to person transaction you are sized up as to what you will pay and that (or a bit more) is probably the price at which it's offered. In dealing with a lot of sales of professional specialized items to small businesses, sole proprietors, non-profits, etc. really anything where you get a "quote" first the price might vary depending on what your ability to pay is.
This type of "big-data pricing" might be doing these things on a larger scale, and it's probably too early say definitively whether this is good or bad for the average consumer (on average it may actually be the same as the current average sales price of a given product), but it's not fundamentally new.
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So is not dying of smallpox. Standardized pricing is not as big an advancement, but it definitely is an advancement.
Have you ever lived in such a society? Or is this your idealized free market assumptions?
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Online is much better, actually. As well as clearing cookies and using different browsers/VPNs, just abandoning your shopping cart often generates a discount coupon. Search engines and price comparison sites are more efficient than going to 20 different physical shops. You can Google for coupon codes too.
If I could do grocery shopping online reasonably well I would rarely go to town any more. Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
Re:Online ? Authors never shopped in real life (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
Seriously? Between the major supermarket chains and Ocado all providing online order / home delivery, none of them works for you? I'll admit, I gave up on Tesco repeatedly sending me things that were one day away from their use-by date, but there's a reasonable amount of competition.
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I mainly go to M&S and Waitrose... It's just not worth skimping on food, it's too important. Ocado doesn't deliver to my area.
I have tried the others, but like you have issues with stuff being nearly out of date or stupid substitutions. It's just not quite there yet.
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For what it's worth, I've had under a dozen substitutions in five years of using Ocado (fewer than I got in any six month period with Tesco before that) and things always come with long shelf lives. They also have excellent customer support and will quickly fix anything that they get wrong.
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They deliver to the other side of my street, annoyingly. I've heard good things about Ocado from other people too, I'd love to give them a try.
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It's not the same. The price in Beverly Hills is the same no matter who you are. Everyone sees the same price. The coupons are available to everyone and offer the same discount to everyone. The sale is marked for all to see.
Imagine if there was no point at all in getting advice from a friend, acquaintance, or coworker about where the find the best price on X because the price will be different for you anyway. Also no point in shopping for the best price because by the time you've checked prices at 3 or 4 pl
My user_agent (Score:5, Funny)
"Mozilla/Linux"
He's a cheap SOB and will expect everything for free.
Re:My user_agent (Score:5, Insightful)
It could also mean "he will try to argue every little detail, and it will take ages until a sale is closed. So let's add a fee for the wasted time."
Not the place we buy things that makes.us suckers (Score:2)
...but that we buy "things" so often and feel we need them, instead of saving for the future so that we can have one when all these things will have been used up anyway
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Why do you buy things you don't need, and who compels you to do this?
If I absolutely MUST have a new pair of shoes (e.g. airline lost my luggage, etc.) today, I go buy them today. If I can wait, then I may shop around a bit. I am also smart enough to factor in the cost of gas when deciding whether or not to drive to some specific place to shop.
What exactly are you saving for? If you die at 89 year old tomorrow with $10 million in the bank, what good was that $10 million to you?
The only thing I'll give yo
Re:Not the place we buy things that makes.us sucke (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly are you saving for? If you die at 89 year old tomorrow with $10 million in the bank, what good was that $10 million to you?
This is a straw-man. You presuppose conditions that are not only of your own devising, but are highly unlikely and exceedingly rare. Most don't even live to 89, and most that do aren't sitting on that kind of a pile of cash, or if they are it's because they're still earning through their investments and are living the way that they want to, they're not denying themselves.
Most people that make a point of planning their long-term finances do so with an eye toward maintaining a comfortable standard of living throughout their lives, including during retirement. They do not want to lose quality of life when they no longer have an income. This means hitting peak savings at retirement age, where the money plus any further interest or growth will last for the remaining years in roughly the same amount as when one was working.
Saving for the future does not mean having to live like a pauper unless one has a job that pays incredibly poorly, but it does mean having discipline to avoid squandering one's money frivolously.
The real trick to price discrimination (Score:5, Informative)
The actual article is much more nuanced than the headline. The most interesting thing that was found with large retailers and price discrimination was not that people saw different prices for the same thing (that apparently seldom happens - to easy for people to get upset about) but that, based on your consumer profile, the particular models of whatever you are looking for are different. If you are high income and searching for headphones, you will see different models (and different brands) than if the system has you as low-income. That is, the system will nudge you towards higher-margin items if they think you have the money; if not you will see lower cost variants. Of course the market segments that way now anyway - Ford vs Lexus vs Maybach. But there is a lot of effort going into gaming your snap decisions.
Re:The real trick to price discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unequal prices can't last in an efficient market. If you sell froods at $1 to the poor and $2 to the rich, then the poor will buy them at $1 and sell them to the rich at $1.50, then $1.10, then $1.01.
Western capitalism has been wildly successful for a number of reasons, but efficient markets preventing haggling and the associated waste is one of them.
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... then $1.01
I see you've shopped on AliExpress
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Yeah, I don't mind Amazon finding the optimal price in my country for a given item.
They had a serious spanking 15 years ago (or so) when they tried to find the optimal price for an individual. If they try that shit again they lose my custom.
Don't worry, clickbait headline (Score:2)
The headline makes the content look far more devious than it is. There are two things you should know about price discrimination and online shopping:
1) If you get the cheapest price online, then you shouldn't worry about price discrimination.
2) Price discrimination often isn't price discrimination at all. Pay more for shoes after a certain time? Perhaps the people that shop after 7PM are more likely to take advantage of the customer service and return policies, so they are actually paying for the shoes and
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Non-sequetor. Unless you mean "the cheapest price anyone paid" as opposed to "the cheapest price offered to you."
Except price discrimination does not have to be between two fully identical products. It's a silly No True Scotsman argument.
Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
Much of the world still considers haggling over price a shopping standard. From open air butchers auctioning off product, to roadside vendors dickering over price. If you pay asking price you are very likely over-paying.
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Stop shopping there (Score:3)
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This is why I use pricewatch.com. Newegg advertises on there and regularly gets beaten.
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I stay away from retailers with auto pricing algorithms that run non stop.
You do. I wish everyone does it also. Otherwise it has close to no impact.
Good price v.s. bad price (Score:2)
... any time there is s good deal the computer starts jacking up the price until it's not so good anymore.
There is more to life than obsessing whether a particular price is the lowest possible price one could pay. Like, for example, the amount of time spent looking for the "best" price on everything.
A "good" price is whatever the buyer thinks an item is worth. When I shop online, unless it's a large ticket item, if the price seems reasonable for something, and if there's no apparent gouging for shipping costs, that's good enough. I order it and move on with my life.
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Exactly this. People don't realize their wallets have the power. Sure, there's going to be the occasional time when you *need* that free 2-day shipping for whatever reason. Most of the time you can shop around. Between Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and a handful of others you can find most anything you would need.
Shop around, find the best price/delivery that works for you, and keep these assholes in competition with one another.
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Not individually, they don't.
Car insurance (Score:2)
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Don't lie to get the cheaper insurance. It'll invalidate it entirely.
Instead, take the expensive insurance from the second cheapest provider. Use the fact you're now insured to get a valid cheaper quote from your favoured insurer. Now use the 14 day no-fee "I changed my mind" option to cancel with the first insurer.
All legitimate and side-stepping inane ways to measure risk.
Er - I'm awake and notice this (Score:5, Informative)
The easiest way to see price discrimination is to go to the rich side of town and go to the grocery store. Observe the price of milk, hamburger, cheese and gasoline. Now to to the poor side of town, repeat.
Clue - if the rich folks think the price is too high on common items, they have the means and time to seek a lower price on commodity items. The poorer side of town is usually time and/or mobility constrained and won't do so.
I noticed that on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), I will see different prices on things like airline tickets or car prices. (You'll need to use source obfuscation - EG hide your real IP). Hint - most car sites are run on exactly the same back ends as all the others.
Also - if you notice a letter code on price tags (pretty rare now days) think I N T R O D U C E S. 10 letters. assign a number for each. This is the cost of the item to the store. Stupid store owners will use 0 - 9 in order. The most common is to assign either even or odd numbers to the first 5, then vice versa.
Smart shop keepers use an initial digit or code, then pick any 10 letter word with no repeating letters. There are over 80 words starting with "B" that don't repeat letters - BLOCKHEADS is one. I like to find these shops, figure out the "code", then consistently offer the owner (Never an employee that might not know the code) exactly one cent above their cost. I like to see just how long it takes the shop owner to figure out I know what he's doing. My all time best effort is 22 years and counting - but he may just be playing stupid. When I have a special order I can't get anywhere else, I'll pay for it up front and don't haggle the price.
That said, I'm a firm believer in enlightened self interest. In my hobby, there are a lot of things I could order on line and save about 40%. But I still buy local and pay full retail. While I could save some bucks by ordering a week in advance, it's in my interest to have it local, where I can walk in and walk out with what I need.
Sometimes a cheap price hurts me more in the long run than other considerations. Besides, despite violently opposing political views, this is a guy that I could call at 3AM and know he'd come help.
And vice versa.
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Law of Economics: Supply/Demand. In Virginia Beach, on the Tourist side of the area prices are way higher. Why? Because people are willing to pay the prices.
What we have to watch out for is the anomalies and the anti-societal prices. Meaning: Hurricane coming? Gas prices should not jump up 4 dollars a gallon. Predatory pricing is where Capitalism has to be reigned in just a little.
Here is a quandary: Some states/cities have no sales tax on food as the reasoning is: it is a basic necessity. Then peo
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The easiest way to see price discrimination is to go to the rich side of town and go to the grocery store. Observe the price of milk, hamburger, cheese and gasoline. Now to to the poor side of town, repeat.
OK, I'll bite. The poor side of town has a Grocery Outlet and a local market called a Bruno's. The expensive side of town (such as it is) has a Safeway. Guess what? The prices are better on the cheap side of town. What were you trying to prove again? (Also, our Safeway is fucking disgusting. About half the time you walk in there, you can smell the fish counter... ACROSS THE STORE. And sometimes it's gackworthy. I wouldn't even go in there if my landlord's bank weren't in there.)
What I do notice is that gaso
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The saddest case is seeing street folk buy the 200ml liquor for $5 when the 1 liter bottle is $9. He's paying $25/liter instead of $9 because he just managed to scrape together $5 and immediately went to the liquor store. And the liquor store knows this when they set those prices.
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The easiest way to see price discrimination is to go to the rich side of town and go to the grocery store. Observe the price of milk, hamburger, cheese and gasoline. Now to to the poor side of town, repeat.
Of course what you're implying, that affluent people have more money and therefore will pay more for food resulting in increased prices, is only one factor in the price. There are several others, for example: property values are higher, the store is likely nicer (ex: cleaner, newer, fancier) on the inside, the employees are likely paid more, and there are possibly additional aesthetic regulations that must be followed (number of trees, limits on traffic/parking lots, etc) in affluent neighborhoods. All of t
This is nothing new (Score:3)
In 1988, Diamond Shamrock paid Frontier Capital (San Antonio) to develop an automated gas pump pricing system. Included in this system was the ability to alter pump prices on a minute-by-minute basis according to time of day. Seven stations in San Antonio deployed a system that bumped gasoline prices between $0.06 and $0.12 during rush hours, 07:00 through 09:30 and 14:30 through 18:00. This system was based on Gilbarco gasoline pumps and custom microprocessor boards based on Motorola 6801 CPUs.
Development of this system proceeded through early 1990, when the decision was made to delay rollout of these systems indefinitely. In 1996, Canadian company bought Diamond Shamrock and decided not to acquire the technology developed by Frontier.
Nothing new. It's more visible now, though.
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There used to be bar in London (and maybe Manchester) that had screens with drinks prices on them. The prices would change during the evening, sometimes there'd be a big 'crash' or a big 'run', which obviously changed the buying habits of the punters that night.
I'm not sure it was based on anything especially clever though - I suspect the manager just used to push the 'up' button a bit when it was busy and 'down' when it was quiet.
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Nothing new. It's more visible now, though.
It's also nothing new to hear people complain about it incessantly.
Long Time Common Practice (Score:2)
This has been going on long before the internet and still continues today in regular brick and mortar stores. I can walk into a convenience store in a poor neighborhood and they'll perpetually have some items on sale at a pretty competitive price regionally and then go to another location owned by the same owner in a wealthy neighborhood and it's perpetually marked up 300%.
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depends on your laws - here in the UK, you can't call something a 'sale' item, or state a 'previous price' unless you sold it at that price for a couple of months previously.
Layout broken (Score:3)
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I see what you did there.
free market economy is based on the right price (Score:2)
When will amazon algorithms figure out that... (Score:5, Interesting)
That I only ever browse Amazon anymore to browse and then go get the same thing on eBay or locally only cheaper and with much faster shipping.
New movies... Well lets see $20 on Amazon assuming they will even sell it to you without prime... $7 for same thing on eBay.
I think it will be a very long time before machine learning algorithms are able to deal with conflicting information or do anything other than seek locally optimal solutions.
This is a variation of the same old story where stores use "big data" to only stock shelves with what has been shown to make the most money only for customers to get annoyed they don't have everything on their list and shop elsewhere.
When enough people get annoyed at the games enough to modify their behavior and go elsewhere as I have done all their super fancy algorithms and or cheap genetic A/B schemes still won't have a clue on earth why.
Time for VPNs (Score:2)
Hey, if I get crap cheaper if I am from Bangladesh, VPNs there will become the next big thing. They practically pay for themselves.
Two can play that game. If one side starts tweaking the variables, expect the other to play along.
Amazon is full of shit (Score:3)
"(Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)"
Perhaps Amazon can explain why the price shown to me for individual music tracks is .30 higher ( each ) than it is when my other half looks at the exact same track. Not that thirty cents bothers me, but they most certainly do not treat all customers the same and I'm curious what the algorithm is.
I havent looked at other goods they offer because I'm too lazy, but they aren't losing money.
Oh Yee Of Little Faith (Score:3)
It's basically variable pricing that is based on your browsing history. That sounds simple enough, but different websites seemed to be using the opposite algorithms,,, if you visited a site now and checked the price on something, and then checked again in an hour, the 1-hour price might be a few percent higher. -Or lower... And likewise, if you checked back in a day, or 3-4 days from now, you might get two more different prices. That may be higher or lower than the [now] price, and the [1-hour] price.
I don't blame anyone for trying to use optimized pricing strategies.
The reason I was curious about it, was because I was wondering what is the process used and more importantly--how can one take maximum advantage of it? Of course at that point I was assuming there would be one method that was pretty similar across sites, but there does not seem to be. If you check a price for a particular item and then come back an hour later to that same item's page, the price may be higher, or may now be lower. Not a HUGE amount; you might have a $25 item get lowered to $22 or bumped up to $27. Or maybe $32. But something here is definitely going on, and some of the bigger online PC parts places are doing it.
Somebody already mentioned one place you see this in action: Newegg. I believe I was shopping for desktop PC parts when I first saw it, so you might keep an eye out when browsing those sites. I've not noticed it at other sites yet, but then, I do a lot of comparison shopping when I'm buying PC parts. And I use Google for normal searches, and that may be playing a big role in the process.
Amazon's "Price Changes" (Score:2)
Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.
Then why are they price changes and not price decreases?
I have no particular problem with varying price-points, but I don't see that Amazon gets to say it's intended for the customer's benefit.
Price (Score:2)
It doesn't make you a sucker unless you are one (Score:3)
Me paying what I am willing to pay for something I want isn't making me a sucker.
It's really the most ideal, individualized capitalism possible.
If I pay more than Mary or Bill, it's because either I have more resources and prices matter less to me, or I want it more. You can't really get more essentially Adam Smith than that. Universalized consistent pricing is a relic of the industrial era.
Data Mining works both way (Score:5, Interesting)
Price Elasticity (Score:2)
the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets
Oh, dear, an article by a Marxist still living in 1860. They love them class warfare vocabulary.
The online shopping sites are not trying to get the highest price they can for every product. They are trying to get the optimal price for every product.
Often times the optimal price can be the lowest price, or close to it. One only needs to look at Walmart's position at #1 on the Fortune 500 to understand this is true.
The optimal price is one tha
Random user agent (Score:2)
Oftopic, but for crissakes! (Score:2)
Meanwhile, isn't that right half of the screen with simple pleasing nothing on it really nice.
Looking
forward
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that
look
like
this!
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It is sort-of new, depending on your time frame. A 10% profit used to be the respectable and moral price. Now it's a numbers game and the well being of the customer doesn't even enter the picture. Go read the stories from sales, marketing, and product engineers from some of the large companies. They do whatever it takes to gain a few percentage points as it's all gamified. The fact that some of their pre-packaged meals are known to have effectively no nutrients is just a way to keep costs down. They'r
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Re:No one makes anyone buy anything. (Score:5, Informative)
Now it's a numbers game and the well being of the customer doesn't even enter the picture.
When, pray tell, was your mythical golden age when corporations put the "well being" of the customer before profit?
Go read the stories from sales, marketing, and product engineers
Go read The Jungle [wikipedia.org], Unsafe at Any Speed [wikipedia.org], or King Leopold's Ghost [wikipedia.org] and perhaps you can disabuse yourself of the notion that greed is a new phenomena.
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One of the current business fads is to push for the no. Meaning continually up-selling until the target gives you a firm no.
Well now, that's a brilliant strategy. Once I say no and am pissed, I'm finished and out the door. I'll give a "polite no thank you" at first, but if I have to get firm about it - boom, outa here.
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Well a lot of people buying stuff are clueless.
Or to quote H. L. Mencken "No one in this world, so far as I knowâ"and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help meâ"has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
So in great many of those cases those tricks will work - unfortunately. I say unfortunately because it encourages being sleazy, not out of any special fondness of idiots.
Re:No one makes anyone buy anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but not for the same reasons. What the net is allowing companies to do is charge different prices for the same exact product based on their assessment of the consumer. Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
"Sir, if you don't like to pay 50 euros for that loaf of bread, I'd like you to know there are tools you can use to look for cheaper deals on bread. Just make sure to clean your cookies and log out of any social networks and put a bag over your head to avoid facial recognition, and remember to enter the store in between 10 and 11:30 and you'll get the maximal discount. But don't be late, the rush hour of bread begins at 11:35 and prices double, or triple for those with a higher education."
Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world? That instead of a price tag on a product conveying the price information openly to everyone the tags would be empty codes that you scan and then get the price, 'tailored just for you' on your phone?
The problem is most people don't realize that this is even happening so many people think the price they're getting from say, some flight booking site is the same as it is for everyone else. They've no idea that the price may well be affected by their past searches on the site and other online behavior.
Currently on products and services using this kind of pricing there's no way for a consumer to know the true 'base price' of the product they're buying. This means that a lot of the price information is completely lost, meaning that the price mechanism no longer functions as it used to. Discount information is always shown to the customer obviously, but under these systems it's possible that even the supposed 'discounted price' you're getting is higher than what the guy next door is paying without any discounts if the price before discount for you was set higher based on your identifier information.
Price search services themselves are not a magical solution to this because they do not remove this issue. You still have no way of knowing whether or not the 'cheapest price' given to you by a search engine is the same as the 'cheapest price' given to someone else using a different operating system or a device and who hasn't queried the same product a couple times before.
I'm no anti-capitalist, but in the name of a free and fair trade I do believe consumers are entitled to equal treatment and transparency when it comes to prices. I'm not saying it's wrong for a company to charge you less/more because of X, Y or Z. I'm saying if that is done you should have access to those modifiers and see why they're charging that extra or giving that discount for you. It's likely true that many of the sites would lose business doing this, but that in and of itself should highlight you the problem at hand: keeping the modifiers secret currently only benefits the sellers and weakens the position of the consumer on the market by hiding information.
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Any actual capitalist necessarily wants a healthy market. A healthy market requires price transparency. Without that, the whole system fails badly.
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Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world?
One of the grocery stores (Kroger/King Soopers/City Market group) here is getting close to that with their loyalty rewards program. You can get personalized coupons through their phone app. I'm sure a number of the variables you listed, and others, play into what coupons, and at what discounts, are provided to individual users. I don't have the app, only a card with no phone number attached, so I couldn't elaborate much more. I'm aware of this b/c my neighbor was explaining all the ways the app kept tra
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Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
Not too many years ago, those were, in fact, standard practices by nearly all merchants. It's only been for the last century or two that stores have gotten in the habit of having fixed, marked prices. Before, prices were negotiated and you can bet that the merchant took into account everything he could see about the customer when deciding what price he could get.
The modern version is a little different, of course, because the online retailer *appears* to have a fixed, marked price, and there isn't an oppo
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It's entirely new. Because it's NOT the highest price the market will bear. It's the highest price YOU PERSONALLY will bear.
The only places that has previously existed is big-ticket items where corporations are rarely involved - like selling a house and trying to negotiate the highest price a potential buyer may pay, but at least that was a negotiation between relative equals. You were both just individuals without an army of lawyers, and both at least economically strong enough to buy a house like that.
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Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony. That's exactly what these companies do - and it ought to be just as illegal.
Luckily, Lawyers don't breed well. . . (Score:2)
. . . . their personalities are de-facto birth control. . . . (grin)
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You do know that liberals are generally bad with money, right?
Yeah, that's probably why they are in general more wealthy than conservatives.
Quiet! No one is supposed to know that. When I had my side business, I was shocked to find out that my wealthiest and most generous patrons were in fact not right wingers. Same for my wife in the housing industry. Good liberal customers. And they were a hellava lot better to work with than the right wingers.
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So you're saying that those who whine the most about the pay gap are flaming hypocrites.
Nope, just people who understand how things work.
In order to have people buy your stuff, you need the people who might buy your stuff to have the money to buy your stuff.
Re: Everything You Buy On Amazon Goes Up (Score:2)
Not always. Before Christmas, there were three pairs of the expensive climbing shoe type and size I wanted left, at about half off. I bought one. Price went down immediately after. Price continued going down day after day until they sold out the stock, and then jumped to full price when they replenished the stock. At low point, it was less than a third of full price. I can't quite figure out what they were doing, but it's like the system didn't like having low stock so they wanted to refill but couldn't unl