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Amazon Charging Different Prices for Same Items?
Rambo writes "Amazon is apparently researching consumer's buying habits by arbitrarily changing the prices on DVDs and other products. Computerworld has a story here about it. Amazon refused to say when they would halt the practice, or what criterion they used to set the different prices." Of course I haven't spent a nickel at Amazon since that whole one-click shopping thing, but I can imagine ways that this could be good or bad. Imagine I buy a lot of Anime DVDs. They could note this, and raise the prices by a buck or something. I tend not to do real-time price shopping on items like this: I looked at a dozen online stores when I started purchasing, and I settled on the one that had the features & prices I want. But 2 months later they could jack the prices and it would be months before I noticed. Alternatively they could lower the prices, or lower prices on similiar items as an incentive to buy other things. Very odd possibilities and I'm not at all sure about how I feel about it.
While your non-marketeer logic sounds good, effective, and frequent-customer friendly, the opposite is actually the case. Print catalogs have had a long practice of raising prices for regular customers because their market research proves that people still think they are getting the best deal because of that first purchase. J. Crew and L.L.Bean are probably the best catalogs to test this with since regular customers get a new catalog every two months or so, and cold mailings go out to mailing listed potential customers at least twice a year
The company assumes (and their research proves this), that customers are driven to them because of past experience and future expectations of value. Therefore, a regular customer is less likely to shop around for a better deal, because they got great deals the first few times they shopped using that catalog.
Furthermore, catalog companies often have two or more catalogs per season. These will look the same, and many of the prices are the same, but the 'regular' customers mysteriously get the catalog with the higher prices. The logic is that they are already hooked, as I said before, because of prior experience and prices.
If you are a packrat like me, you can check catalog prices. I bought a bunch of stuff from J Crew, the next mailing the prices on many things were slightly-to-considerably higher than the original catalog I had ordered from (same season), my wife (different last name) recieved the same seasons catalog (cold mailing) whose prices were the same as the original catalog I had ordered from.
That is, unless they always ring the high price, assuming that people won't catch it at the register? Wal-Mart used to have a policy that if an item scanned the wrong price, they'd give your $5 off, or the item free, whichever was less. I suppose they don't do that anymore?
Jeff
Ever since I got my Apex DVD player, I've been collecting the Region 2 Farscape DVDs, purchased from various retaillers in the UK. Disc Set 1 I bought from Amazon.co.uk, for 20% of the UK retail price. When I went back to buy Disc Set 2, they had changed their pricing policy to 1UKP off retail (about a 2% discount). This was dumb : once you added in postage, it was cheaper to buy the set from a brick and mortar establishment in the UK. I had a brief email exchange with Amazon UK customer service (also pointing out that it was cheaper for UK customers to buy DVDs from Amazon US [yeah, UK DVD players can handle Region 1 ;-)] than it was to buy from AUK) that boiled down to "I'm letting you know you've lost my custom until you fix it".
Lo! This time, when I go to get Disc Set 4 (after having bought from blackstar.co.uk the last two times) Amazon UK was the best deal again. Co-incidence? I think not. :-) But it was a dumb move in the first place. I suspect this whole variable-pricing at Amazon.com is part of the same strategy : let's see if people will still buy if it's NOT 25% off retail...me, I always shop around for the best price, and give my custom accordingly.
Actually, every grocery store membership I've seen does indeed change the price at the register. I know here in Texas, for instance, Randall's (now part of the giant Safeway) Remarkable Ripoff-protection-racket card is required to avoid paying *way* too much at the register (fortunately, thier main competitor here, HEB, doesn't play such games, so they get our grocery $$.)
It's not even the profiling I object to (since there's really no way to avoid it anymore anyway, unless you always pay with actual green cash) so much as the attitude that "you must play our game or we'll make you pay through the nose".
This is really the whole point of affinity-group marketing: the price one customer pays for a given product may be different from the price paid by the next customer. The big products companies are using these sorts of systems to target products at particular demographic segments that may be eligible for a discount negotiated though professional organization (say, doctors) or to influence the buying habits of first-time moms with a new baby.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I can go into Border's and receive 10% off any book because I'm a teacher. I have a card that identifies me as such.
A woman in line in front of me bought Elmore Leonard's "Pagan Babies" for the sale price. I bought "Pagan Babies" for sale price less 10 %. We got different prices on the same day for the same book purely based on some arbritrary criteria.
Another example: I go into Seattle's Best Coffee. A man in front of me gets a latte for list price. I go in, plunk down my frequent buyer's card, get the latte for free because I've bought ten lattes.
Same day, same item, same clerk, different prices.
Since we don't know Amazon's criteria, I'm not sure we can accuse them of discriminating against certian *people*, right? I mean, I've bought a lot of stuff at Amazon, and over the past few days as I've been following this story, I've noticed that I'm received the lowest prices for all the DVDs that they're listing.
They're not lowering the prices because my hair is brown, my eyes are blue, and I write left-handed, right?
They're not lowering it because I'm a democrat and I think the Shrub (Bush) is a dumb, loud-mouthed boor.
They're lowering the price based on whatever information I've given them, my ordered habits over the years, and the books (and DVDs) that I've ordered in the past.
Obviously, they've got some sort of criteria that they've established -- repeat customers, money spent over the past year, orders over the last month, whatever -- and they're applying it to me.
Or maybe they're setting random prices and seeing if it's enough to "catch" me based on my demographic.
Whatever.
But I know that I take one look at the list price, one look at the sale price, and make my decision there. If the sale price is too close to the list price, I won't buy it, period.
If the sale price is 30, 40% of the list price, I'll probably buy it.
I think the issue here isn't that they're doing it -- charging less for some customers, more for others -- but that we don't *know* the criteria.
And of course because we're all good little paranoid Pynchonians (see 'The Crying of Lot 49' or 'Gravity's Rainbow' to see what I mean) we suspect the worst -- that not only are they screwing us and fucking with our privacy -- they're also fucking with our heads.
Bad Amazon! Bad! Bad! Bad!
Obviously Amazon noticed that MS customers are willing to pay more for things...
Simply point out to the NCAA that some student atheletes are getting special discounts because they are coming from an EDU or some such silliness and Amazon will be taken through the ringer. Look what's happening to the guy who gives discounts to everyone at a shoe store in Wisconsin. Gave the same discounts to atheletes and now WI is in prohbation. Think about it.
(`._(`._( , , . JimmyPop[nL] . , , )_.)_.)
And then the store that just give you their lowest price will get the sales because it's easier to just shop there?
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Or, they could notice that you buy a lot of Anime DVDs and *gasp* lower the price by a buck or two to get your valuable business. Why must we always assume the worst about everything?
I tend not to do real-time price shopping on items like this: I looked at a dozen online stores when I started purchasing, and I settled on the one that had the features & prices I want. But 2 months later they could jack the prices and it would be months before I noticed.
That's one of the worst ways to shop online I've ever heard of. First, decide on what you want. Then, find the lowest price from a reputable dealer and buy it there. Try this: pricewatch.com
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Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
If you read anything regarding this situation, you'd see that Amazon is not a monopoly. While it is true that under a monopoly, consumer prices are higher, that's not the reason behind this case. What they're doing is determining to what extent someone who has a strong preference for a particular product is insensitive to price increases.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
There are two fundamentally differences between one-to-many marketing (and pricing) and one-to-one marketing (and pricing).
The first is that one-to-many marketing uses statistical data (think insurance) for determining appropriate price or discount. While one-to-one may use individual buying patterns, browsing patterns, neighborhood or regional criteria, and survey data such as household income. I have taken at least one survey at Amazon.com. Although the information is only as accurate as I want it to be.
The second difference is that collusion can now occur at the individual level. Just last week there was an article on slashdot about Amazon.com planning on selling their customer data. When other retailers discover that you are price-insensitive at Amazon.com you may discover you are paying list price regardless of where you shop! Of course, the government will not allow Amazon.com to sell their data directly to their competitors but other channels (i.e. information resellers) will emerge.
-- My Sig
and it's spelled propaganda not propoganda
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
On a related note, Amazon apparently lied to users when they said that users could be removed from the customer database.
Several months ago I opted to take part in the boycott against Amazon because of their patent stances. I had been a long-time and frequent customer to that point, so I sent a note to their customer service address explaining my position and asking to be deleted. One of their people responded very politely with an explanation of their position on the patent issue. We traded several emails discussing the point. Obviously my position did not change, and the customer service representative agreed to delete my records.
I recently received an email notification from them regarding their change in policy making customer data a saleable asset. This makes it obvious that I was not, in fact, deleted from their database. While they may have "closed" my account to make it inaccessible, they retain my data as an asset.
Bad Bezos, no donut.
You're right on. Amazon can charge whatever they want for their merchandise. It seems that most of the posters so far seem to think that everyone is a super-impulse buyer; that somehow typing in www.bn.com and checking out what they happen to be charging is really that hard to do. For every purchase that I make online I check as many sites as I can for better prices in no time flat. If amazon wants to charge me more then I'll go elsewhere--and fast! I'm in the situation where I'm just starting the DragonLance series. If amazon sees me purchase the first two books in the series do people honostly think they'll charge me MORE? I truly doubt that amazon's consumer model is built around alientating their customer base. You give good, fair prices to your new customers and drop your profit margin to your loyal ones because you'll make it up in volume. It doesn't take a economist to know that.
One of the ultimate mecas of retail is to charge every customer a different price, and that price is - whatever the maximum they are willing to pay. You can see stores doing this with "customer loyality" cards too. They'll charge outrageous prices, that is, unless you use their card which will bring you down to normal levels. At that point, they carefully record all the purchases and buying habbits you make and will price and discount stuff that they figure you wouldn't have bought otherwise. They also target you heavially to fufill their dream of the ultimate marketing mecca - to be able to target every individual customer with a custom made pitch designed to lure the max in purchases out of them that they are willing to pay. It's sorta cute, but you're rather stupid if you play their game, information technology put's the power in your court - not theirs. If you're always jumping through their hoops you're never going to realize that it is they who should be jumping through your hoops. You should realize that the same technology that allows them to pigeon hole you so well, also allows you to bypass them totally and leave them out of the loop. Orginisations like "Mercata" are one example "Priceline" another, ebay another, and there are a lot of barter and exchange sites on the web where if you do it right you could get a $1000 worth of furniture, someone else could get $1000 worth of computer programming from you - so both of you got $1000 of worth that each of you didn't have before and the IRS is none the wiser. This is what the internet's all about.
Simple economics says that the best way maximize profit is to charge each customer the maximum they are willing to pay for a particular item. If they can track your buying habits and theorize you may be willing to pay more for an item, then it behooves them to do so. The goal of the corporation (Amazon) is to make money.
Now I don't even have to leave Amazon to do my price comparison
shopping! Just view the site with different browsers and cookies,
and see what kind of deals you can get!
Does this mean we can figure out Amazon's 'pricing scheme' to rip them off?
This is upmodded as "interesting"??
Some people can't detect a troll even if it comes up to them and bites them on the ass.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
See:
Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty
-Jeff
So then we'd need a distributed bot such that each client would look like a normal person browsing.
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and they'll be able to offer a lower price because they don't have to pay the overhead for "gouging bots"
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+&x
Insurance and Credit Cards have been doing this for years. It's nothing new. Car insurance companies give you a cheap deal at first (compared to your old company), then wait until you've been a good policy holder for a couple of years, and then start raising your rates. Most people blame it on inflation, or don't even notice, and the insurance gains.
Credit cards are the worst for this though. They offer some ridiculous introductory rate (2% or something) then 6 months later, introductory time is over, and the 24% reality sets in -- on the money you borrowed when it was 2%.
The best thing to do is just to keep a lookout for the best prices. Don't always go to one store. Compare, who can give it to you cheaper, B&N or Amazon? So if they raise the price too high you go somewhere else. So what?
And what ever happened to that shopping agent idea? Did that get beaten down with that auction site lawsuit? It was going to be a little web window, and you would tell it the item you wanted, and it would search, and then keep a continuous lookout over time (for sales, etc) to get you the best price. Did this die? Something like this would keep the market in balance.
Also, its important to understand that there are two significantly different methods comparison sites use to obtain prices. Sites such as BestBookBuys perform a real-time search, and are therefore going to be the most accurate. Other comparison sites, like shopping.com, or mysimon.com compile records daily, and are not real-time searches. Their data is more likely to be incorrect, however since it is all in their own database, you get a faster comparison.
Real time searches should not be affected too much. Amazon is likely to be taken off of these if the real time search doesn't match their price. It won't matter a whole lot if that happens because people who comparison shop for prices already know the best price is not going to be from amazon.com.
If amazon.com doesn't work well with comparison sites its their loss. Amazon's biggest mistake is that their business plan calls for them to dominate selling on the web. That part of their plan is backfiring as more and more businesses are figuring out how to play the web game. We will end up with a great variety of stores to choose from, and consenquently, sites that analyse the great variety of choices will be popular.
Comparison sites are here to stay. If Amazon refuses to cooperate with them, oh well. There are always the 100 or so other stores in any given category that a comparison shopper can choose from.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This is not that uncommon. For example, I think priceline.com does the same thing. The first time a new customer makes a "bid" on a plane ticket, they will usually "win" it. This creates goodwill (loyalty?) on the part of the customer. After that, Priceline will alter their acceptance/rejection of that customer's bids, to determine how price sensitive the customer is. Their subsequent pricing will take advantage of that information. This is not traditional yield management (Priceline does not own the commodity, so from their perspective the commodity is not perishable), rather it is profile-based price management.
Uhhh... Priceline does not accept or reject your offer. The company making the sale does. After trying to purchase a car for certain amount directly, I was constantly rebuffed. They said my price was too low, even though I knew the invoice price and exactly how much the dealer would make on the vehicle.
I made a reasonable offer on priceline, and it was accepted. Not by priceline, but by a specific dealership nearby.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Lets see amazon try to claim that their cookies are not yours to sell.
Hmmm... well seeing as how my cookies are a direct lookup on my account information, I doubt amazon.com would really care if I sold them, but *I WOULD*!
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
It's understandable, because you probably have a Kroger Spy Card (er, um Kroger Plus Card) which tracks your buying habits, the data is probably sold, and in exchange you get a few cents off your Bud.
The good news is that Amazon doesn't have this kind of market power, and it probably won't, because the barriers to entry to this business are fairly low. But if they do get sufficient market power, then they may need to get scrutinized, unfortunate as that may be.
It's really too bad, if you think about it, that vendors keep pushing the limits of fair play. It's just like privacy practices - it's as if they want the heavy hand of the Feds cracking down on them.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
In other online bookstores. They list the same book several times, with different prices. Apparently, they come from different distributors. Though one should think they should be able to key on ISBN number and use only the cheapest distributor...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Brick and block retailers have done this forever, it is simply a method of tracking buying habits.
*Long* ago, when working in retail during undergrad, I remember putting the same exact same sweater in two parts of the store. One pile had signage stating "Handknit $80.00"...the other had signage of "Sale 20% Off List Price" and that stack was priced at $100. Sold absolutely none of the $80 sweaters but sold about 75 off the "sale" stack.
All amazon is doing is a more organized version of the same thing...what makes people by different things at different prices. Bottom line is, shop price between the handful of companies that you like to use and take the best deal. Personally, I have found that amazon tends to do very well under this approach.
The more interesting thing is that they seem to be selling books that should not be sold in this country (the US) under thier distribution agreements. I was excited to find a copy of Iain Bank's book "Use of Weapons" on amazon as it had been out of print in the US for some time. When I received it I checked the back. Sure enough, it listed the EU and Canadian prices and *specifically* stated, "not for sale in the US"...there are considerable fines and, more importantly, loss of distribution rights for violations of dist. rights. Chances are, it slipped through the proverbial cracks...either that or they just assume that given who they are, the rules don't apply in exactly the same way (e.g. see the recent Harry Potter flap).
rootrot
I think the issue here isn't that they're doing it -- charging less for some customers, more for others -- but that we don't *know* the criteria.
Yes, that is exactly my point. I know seniors or students may get a certain discount at movie theaters or whatever. Fine. In these situations the criteria is public and I can make my judgements based on that information. The precise problem here is that we have no idea why Amazon is charging certain individuals more than others.
Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no. -- J.R.R. Tolkien
The ComputerWorld article mentions Amazon.coms 30-day price guarantee. But, imagine that Amazon.com sets a cookie on your computer. This information could contain information on the item you purchased and the price you paid for it. Then when you dutifully check back on Amazon.com withing 30-days to check the price Amazon.com knows not to show you a price lower than it already quoted to you.
Does this price guarantee cross users. If I pay $10.00 for an item and a friend of mine is quoted $9.00 for the same item can I get my $1.00 back?????
(oops, didn't realize how well my .sig fits in with the previous comment)
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News.Com has a story on it -- a little more depth.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Back in the old days (1998), it was considered easy to manually, personally go to different websites. Man, look how we have progressed.
I wonder if my wooden shoes still fit?
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I guess since they're operating with losses in the billions now, they decided fleecing consumers a bit and calling it "research" was acceptable... let's see what they do now that they've been caught at it.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I don't think this particular situation is about selling to loyal customers or selling bulk items. It's about seeing how much they can raise the price for a particular individual before that individual goes somewhere else.
Perhaps I'm just a capitalist, but isn't that what business is all about? That is, maximizing the profit margin. Perhaps a better example than the Ferrari would be a very wealthy individual at a bank; they get a better interest rate than me (with my average of about $0.37 in checking).
But my friend who isn't such a hard core junkie needs a little more incentive to buy so they sell the exact same items to him for say a buck less. Is this right? I don't think so.
I'm going to throw some wording around and say that I don't think this is wrong. Ultimately the power rests with the consumer. If Amazon's prices are too high, the buyer can go elsewhere. However, if it takes me an hour to find the same product for $1 less, I have actually lost money (assuming my time is worth more to me than $1/hr).
Of course now that we know that everybody isn't getting the same prices/treatment we'll just have to start comparison shopping. Amazon just hopes that there is a price we will pay for the "convienience" of buying from them.
And lots of people will pay for that convenience, including myself. See my above paragraph for an example of how paying $1 more for the same product can actually be more beneficial. I've always received great service from Amazon, they have a good selection, so I still shop there.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Sounds like they're doing a bit of supply and demand pricing perhaps. Don't forget, most things on Amazon are below the printed price on the cover, so there's got to be a margin that they work within...
Could this tactic be used by other online retailers without consumer knowledge?
For example: CDNow has a "my CDNow", which will make recommendations based on past purchases (and user input, if any) as to other albums (cd's) you might enjoy. Should we be concerned that Amazon's "Consumer Randomly Allocated Pricing" scheme might catch on in the music market?
Basically, should we be concerned about more of this CRAP online?
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Sorry, game over. This could effectively kill price-finding bots, as the only way to determine a price is to establish an identity. And every user's price won't be that of the bot's. Add to the fact that many companies are trying to make price finding bots illegal, and legislation intended to give copyright status to databases of facts could very well make price lists the "property" of that particular vendor, and you've got the formula where supply and demand are history, and the only thing that influences prices is how much you can spend.
It's efficient all right, at raping the consumer.
List Price: $99.98
Our Price: $69.99
You Save: $29.99 (30%)
Using IE5, behind a firewall and a WebSenseless proxy.
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Well, maybe because "neither the National Cancer Institute nor the American Cancer Society recognizes the reliability of such an association." Two unbiased organizations, I might add. Gee, I think I'd give their medical opinion a little bit more worth than a minority of "doctors" that claim otherwise (I wonder which side of the abortion fight they're on, eh?)
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
You trust Amazon's "list" prices, which are basically MSRPs? They're usually inflated, and sometimes completely bogus.
I don't shop at Amazon, but for the most part list prices for DVDs are well known. If you want to say that the list prices are inflated by the studio, that's up to you. I don't think Amazon inflates the list prices of DVDs.
If one buys DVDs at buy.com, stay away from the free shipping deals. It seems once they announce free shipping, the prices on everything increases by 3$. Depending on how many suckers they find, they could stand to profit more from those that buy more than one disc.
Personally, if the disc is already released, buy from DVD Planet. They don't dick with prices, having consistent 30% discounts for many years, no SRP fudging and $2.50 flat rate shipping.
They might with CDs, I have found list prices that varied on those by as much as 5$, depending on who you buy it from. For what I was trying to buy, something out of production, the stated list price didn't matter as no one had it anymore. At at least one place the list price was inflated to make the 30% markdown cost more than the normal discount at other places...
I don't like the idea of being given random prices to see how much I'll pay. When I go somewhere, I want to have a stable price that isn't dependent on a rand() statement or what's already in my computer.
To me, the worst part is that no one is told what is going on.
FWIW, I went through the steps to "close" my account back when I joined the boycott. As detailed in my post in this thread titled "on a related note", closing the account does not necessarily mean that they delete the related information. I continue to receive emails, so it's clear that I'm still on their list.
Especially now that they've classified your data as a saleable asset belonging to them, it's doubtful they will actually delete it from their database.
C'est la vie, or so it seems.
The same people who brought you vietnam and communists like bill clinton are going to honestly regulate prices? The government can't even budget itself properly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is standard practice for many businesses. Banks offer bonuses for new accounts, magazines give teaser subscription rates to new subscribers.
Everything in this post is false.
In the article they mention that the price difference they saw was evident when they made the first request with Netscape (cheaper) and the second with Internet Explorer. Is it possible that one of the criteria Amazon are using in their pricing decisions is what browser you are using?
Like Netscape users are cheap-skates? 'I bought this browser in 1996 and it still works, I'm not gonna buy another one dammit!' etc. Or maybe they assume that if you use Netscape you probably run Linux (yeah I know that its available from the User-Agent header, but if you had to dual boot, you might use Netscape when you were in Windows too for consistency), and maybe they think that if don't pay for software, you're not likely to buy a DVD if it costs a lot?
Brick-and-mortar stores don't usually do it on a customer-by-customer basis though (because it would damn near impossible, esp. with posted prices on the products on the shelves).
Shop around.
Amazon is applying the capitalist principle known as sell at the highest price you can.
You should apply the opposite, buy at the lowest price you can.
There are alternatives, use them.
I've also noticed amazon sending a lot of "this is taking longer to get than we exepcted" mail...in response to to which I cancel everything outstanding and order it from elsewhere. (One must wonder if this is a sign of financial sickness; taking longer than expected to get inventory can be caused by not paying bills on time...). I have yet to be disapponted by a competetor's prices or ability to deliver.
Sigh. Look, I'll make it easy. This post describes an example of what I'm talking about. Same company, same state, different prices "for research". Happens all the time.
Especially now that they've classified your data as a saleable asset belonging to them, it's doubtful they will actually delete it from their database.
;)
It disgusts me how right you are. I wonder what else we can do, short of suing them? I guess, when in doubt, call ZDNet. They'll turn anything into a front-page story.
-Waldo
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You would hope so, but the point, as you mentioned, is that we don't know what criteria they're using. Maybe they are charging you higher prices because of your political views, or your taste in music. Both of these, and other attributes, can be guessed with varying degrees of accuracy from your past purchases. Now it probably isn't happening because it doesn't make commercial sense to do so (although it's possible -- here in the UK at least, those leaning to the politic right tend to have a higher disposable income than other, and so would probably worry less about paying slightly more). The point is, we just don't know.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Would it be possible for an auto-shopper agent looking for a particular item to log onto a company like Amazon.com's as many different individuals, pick the best price offered & buy that?
This is a non-issue. If you agree to a price when you buy something, the only person you can blame later is yourself. So what if they are doing price testing? Shop around. Show them you won't pay the higher price.
Precisely. People are screaming "discrimination," but really it's just a demographic issue. If I buy Fargo and Raising Arizona but not The Big Lebowski, Amazon.com is within their rights to either lower the price of Lebowski (to entice me to buy it) or raise the price (betting that I will return to buy it anyway). But the decision to buy or not rests with me, the consumer.
Of course, some folks will spend 30 minutes looking around the 'net for a lower price on a particular item. When they find it for $1 less than on Amazon, they'll proclaim, "Ah ha! I showed them, I'm saving money!" Personally, my time is worth more to me than $2/hr. Amazon is a convenience - I go there knowing that I will most likely be able to find what I am looking for, and that it will arrive in a timely manner, without any difficulties (at least this has been my experience thus far). Personally, I'm willing to pay $1 extra for that.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Personally, I welcome Amazon not working with comparison sites. It will be their loss. There are already over 50 other bookstores that are set up to sell books online. If one single company decides it doesn't want to be compared with the rest, it wont have a great effect on comparison searches.
Folks, there are a great variety of stores out there to choose from. The internet lends itself to variety, not monopolies that dominate an entire area of business. If one company decides to go against the nature of the internet(which lends itself perfectly to lots of businesses and comparison shopping) they are only going to be hurting themselves.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
How will they ever survive the loss of such an important person as you? Even if you don't like them, please reconsider: They've got families, too, and if Amazon folds — how can they not, after hearing that you are no longer a customer — they'll be kicked out onto the streets. Such a cruel, uncaring world...
Cheers,
But what value are you going to see from amazon on a given item? If they're giving a super deal to anyone with a certain cookie set, you're not going to be able to tell that from one of the comparison shopping engines. Those engines might tell you that amazon is charging 21.98 and you can get it elsewhere for 20.49. But if you yourself went to amazon the price they gave you might be 20.10. Which price is amazon going to give out to the comparison shopping engines? The best one that is for a very few of its customers? Or the one highest one that makes them the most profit?
And what if all the big e-tailers start doing this? Then the results from the comparison shopping engines will be so polluted that the only way you could tell what price YOU would find at these sites is to go there yourself.
I don't think so. I think their calculations are based on what is sold, not how many people look but then go somewhere else. It is to find out how many people would buy at a certain price, for three different prices. They can figure out based on volumes sold at each price and eventually pick a price that gives them the most sales at the most margin possible.
If IE and Netscape give different prices, it might be useful for me to set Junkbuster to send a fake browser type to Amazon, so I could make it think I have Netscape or IE as appropriate. Has anyone got a list of browser type strings to use?
California has state law in this area, but I haven't looked it up.
The next step, I suppose, is a browser plug-in that generates a range of different situations involving cookies, browser type, and previous page viewed to see what prices come back.
Whatever happened to the concept of "Agents", software that would comb the net for Things I Want at Cheap Prices? It was thought, not too long ago IIRC, that we'd be able to give a piece of software a shopping list and it'd negotiate on our behalf, request confirmation, and then handle the purchase for us. That'd put a stop to this crap right quick, and would cut down on the marketroid garbage too. Amazon would be forced to compete with a mom-n-pop web-based bookseller, because they might just be able to get my comic books 5 cents cheaper.
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
An added bonus, the mom-n-pops that could deliver 5 cents cheaper would benefit, as the barrier to entry would be lower (no need for a one-click patent and a huge web presence if your back end is going to negotiate directly with another piece of software.)
The real Threed's
--Threed
It's kind of a stupidity tax really. Browse with cookies on, pledge loyalty to a corporation or a brand and pay more.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
I think the issue here isn't that they're doing it -- charging less for some customers, more for others -- but that we don't *know* the criteria.
It's probably a few things. Actually it can be pretty much anything, but most likely is focues on demographic, behavioural , and psychographic info. That is, who you are, what you do, and why. All of this information is now easily available (through various list, government, and credit card companies, read the fine print). They have demographics (which are easily available given an address), they have behavioral (thanks Doubleclick), and they are building psychographic (that's what the experiments are for).
Now my problem with this type of marketing comes with the shit hits the fan as it were. In other words, when the man comes calling and it's time to pay up. Amazon (and everyone) is looking for that profitable point. What happens when they realize that if they limit access (maybe by charging high prices) to certain types of customers based on this profile they build. This customer profile could be anything. From racial stereotyping to newbie fingering. And because the cost of doing business with that type of person is consistently higher, they consistently get charged more (or seem to get a lot of 404s).
Anyway, just some musings. With the amount of processing available and the amount of information available, this type of marketing will become more common.
And if you'll flashback with me for a moment. I just went on vacation to Mexico, where they had an open air market. No prices, just stuff and vendors. Then you barter. How much you pay depends on one thing made up of two things. The two things are how much you'll pay and how much the vendor will sell it for. The one thing is how much you pay.
Just make sure you always have choices in the marketplace, and things should be fine *coughM$*.
(for the record, I'm boycotting Amazon proper because of their abuse of stupid laws)
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+&x
Welcome to 1984 ladies and gentlemen, where your every move is monitored by Amazon.com, not me!! I'll spend the extra buck to go to Barnes and Noble, they don't sell all your account info to the highest bidder.. ie (name ,credit report, purchases since beginning of time, etc etc...)
Real-time price changes in brick-n-mortar stores *does* happen... One particular large department store (I think it was Wal-Mart) updates sales in real time. When you go through the checkout line and they scan the item, the price you pay is determined by a number of factors. Also, the fact that the item was purchased goes to their computers (housed in a huge brick building next to their HQ) and inventories and price data are updated. So, YES, you might pay more - or less - than the person in front of you who just bought the same thing. In Amazon's case, it's just a bit easier to notice. Does that make it wrong? Nope. Also, I don't believe that they do it on a person by person basis. It is most likely done by time, title, etc.
Karma? We don' need no steenkeeng karma!
Note current slashdot article.
And if they charge a dollar more as a penalty, why wouldn't that mythical shopper continue to make purchases elsewhere? In this scenario, it would be more likely that the company would decrease the price in order to attract that shopper's business.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
Second, the law of supply and demand says the price will go up, not down. The higher the individual demand, the higher they can charge you, especially if all other retails base price on individual and not the group as a whole.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The analogy doesn't quite hold, because the price of a car is negotiable, and people don't generally buy cars from the same dealership several times a month, so they can't really get effective profiling information.
Wouldn't help. If I find that the product costs $x on the search bot, and then I go there and it's significantly more, I will keep looking.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
If you don't like it, then shop elsewhere.
Everything in this post is false.
Actually, they do this to make you buy more. The funny thing is that people don't buy based on the best price, they buy on the catchiest price. Also, if something is more expensive it is 'better'. This doesn't work for everything, but that is why they test prices -- to find the price that they will sell the most of a particular product at. Sometimes pricing stuff higher works better. They are not doing this to rip you off (ie raise the prices when you want it based on your purchase history).
This is doubletalk. Of course Amazon is ripping people off. When I find out some outfit is doing stuff like this, I don't trust them. After one-click, the new privacy policy and now this, I am not going to do business with these sleazy net carneys again.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores. The issue here is not that Amazon is analyzing the buying patterns of consumers in the aggregate and changing prices based on this information. The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
So you are saying this is exactly like buying a car from a car dealership?
(-1 Troll)
I got a unique browser cookie from the Neiman-Marcus e-com server, which is supposed to automatically fool online retailers into giving me their best price.
Well, actually I just got the recipe from them. Only cost me $200, haven't tried it yet.
Don't spread this around.
Just a tip for people who frequently travel. [...]
Duly noted, but most people here rarely make it out of the basements in their parents' house, much less get on airplanes. Good tip, though, and yes I'm being serious — thanks!
Cheers,
The airlines and hotels alter their pricing because they have a "perishable" product. An unsold airline seat becomes worthless as soon as the plane takes off. They call it yield management. They alter the price as it gets closer to the expiration date, in order to maximize their revenue.
The technique being used by Amazon is actually quite different, since books and CDs are not perishable. Amazon is altering the price based on who is doing the buying. If they know you are a loyal Amazon customer, they may charge you more because they think they can get away with it. If they know you are a price shopper, they may charge you less, because they think it is the only way they will get your business.
Auto dealers take a similar approach. If you are a loyal customer of XYZ dealership, you will pay more for a car, because that dealer knows you prefer to buy from them.. There is also research that shows women and minorities pay more for cars, apparently because the dealerships (on average) feel that women and minorities (on average) have less bargaining power. Essentially they are taking a profile of what they know about you (previous customer) or what they assume about you (male/female; white/black/brown/tan) and using that profile to adjust their pricing.
What is happening with online shopping is even more insidious. Because online retailers have the ability to create detailed profiles and automatically adjust the prices accordingly, they can really take advantage of the situation. The unfortunate thing is that loyal customers will often get the worst deal.
This is not that uncommon. For example, I think priceline.com does the same thing. The first time a new customer makes a "bid" on a plane ticket, they will usually "win" it. This creates goodwill (loyalty?) on the part of the customer. After that, Priceline will alter their acceptance/rejection of that customer's bids, to determine how price sensitive the customer is. Their subsequent pricing will take advantage of that information. This is not traditional yield management (Priceline does not own the commodity, so from their perspective the commodity is not perishable), rather it is profile-based price management.
So how can consumers protect themselves? The most important thing is to minimize the amount of information a retailer has about you. The less a seller knows about you the better. This is because companies that use profile-based pricing will almost always offer a "new" customer the best deal in the hopes of gaining your trust (so you will hopefully become a "loyal" customer and they increase their pricing and profit later).
Other things consumers can do:
(1) Do not patronize companies that practice this approach.
(2) Publicly condemn companies that take this approach
(3) Utilize price comparison services
(4) Be ruthless about price shopping
(5) Do not become loyal to a single retailer
(6) Shop as anonymously as possible
(6) Just say no
Now go back to amazon as a new user. Are the newbie prices on your favorite items higher, or lower? My guess is your personalized prices will always be lower, because you're a good customer and they want you to come back.
If not, if they've been gouging you, sign up as a new user, get the good price, and send the evidence of rip-off to slashdot as a tell-all expose :)
Most major airlines will guarantee you that, when you call or go to their website, they are offering you the best price available for a given travel date, destination, class of service, restrictions, etc... It sounds like Amazon is simultaneously offering different prices to different people based on aspects of their "electronic persona" that have nothing to do with the level or type of "service" received or volume of business they are doing. This seems inherently unfair, and seems like a stupid move to me, based on the amount of negative publicity it will generate.
Online retailers do have the capability to "personalize" pricing, and doing things like offering additional discounts to regular purchasers based on a structured, frequent flyer-like programs would be a great way to enhance customer loyalty. But there really needs to be a comparable "best price first" guarantee that you're not paying more for an item based on inconsequential factors.
Welcome to 1984 ladies and gentlemen, where your every move is monitored by Amazon.com, not me!! I'll spend the extra buck to go to Barnes and Noble, they don't sell all your account info to the highest bidder.. ie (name ,credit report, purchases since beginning of time, etc etc...)
I just don't feel very comfortable after the latest release by them, saying that all information of users is their property, and will be used how they wish when they wish. F***** that!! and them too.. I will NOT sponsor some large company blazing around, treating their customers like crap. no thanks!!
You know you're so angry in both those posts I'm not sure if we agree or not. `;^)
Actualy, this is not price fixing (as mentioned by numerous posts). It's actually called price discrimination. This is where a firm charges different prices to different customers based on their buying habits, or any number of other factors. An excellent example of this is a form of price discrimination that I personally am a big fan of (at least until I graduate). When you go to a movie theater there are usually at least two ticket prices. One price for normal people, and one for students. This student discount is not because the theaters think movies are educational, or because they feel sorry for poor students. Instead, it's because students tend to have the time and inclination to watch more movies, and therefore by lowering the ticket price, the theaters actually sell more tickets, and make more money. If the price were lowered for adults however, it would cause the theaters to lose money, because my parents would still only watch 2 movies a year, but pay less for them. Amazon is doing the same thing here, but with a much finer resolution. Instead of dividing consumers into general groups, they're looking at each individual consumer. This will be beneficial for some consumers, but not for others. However, no matter what it will benefit amazon, which is the entire point of the exercise. You're welcome to suggest that making profits is immoral, but I personally feel that that's the entire point of a company (and for that matter an individual).
Of course we expect companies to perhaps lower prices based on arbitrary considerations for some people and remove some bucks from the list price. This is considered a way to attract business. Raising prices, based on how much they think they can sucker more money out of you, however, is what I consider unethical.
You folks wanted the bazaar, and it looks like we got it; time to brush up those haggling skills.
I've seen this with Dell as well. We're a Dell major account customer, but up to this time I've never bought anything from Dell. I was planning on buying a 2U server and was browsing Dell's site looking at the 2450. I spec'd one out and printed the specs on Friday. On Monday I got the company's corporate login for Dell and repriced the same server and LO AND BEHOLD the price went up nearly $1000!
I expect computer stuff to fluctuate (RAM, disks, and CPUs seem to be subject to production constraints and high demand lately) a little, but $1000 over a weekend just seemed wrong. I checked on Dell's consumer site (same machine, natch, I didn't think of them tracking me with a cookie) and the price was the same.
I thought it was really odd, but pity for Dell, they lost the sale to HP after jacking their price on me. After reading this, I'm sure I was the victim of "selective selling". By seeing me as a corporate customer they'd been making money off of they were plenty willing to try to steal from me. I'm glad they didn't.
In retrospect, I kind of wish I would have called the Dell rep to ask WTF was going on with a $1k price jump in 72 hours, but I liked the HP guy better and just blew it off. I suspect that I would have gotten a different, third price from a real person with some room for bargaining.
Do you think that means they'll start making a profit?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
- Twentieth Century Music; How It Developed, How To Listen To It: $99
- Speak 5001 Easy Phrases in Spanish French Italian & German: $99
and- Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial: $34.95
- Embrace an Angry Wind : The Confederacy's Last Hurrah Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville: $34.95
These are completely different books, and Amazon has the audacity to charge us the same amount. I have no idea who Simone Weil is, but I am positive she's nowhere near as valuable as some angry wind in Nashville.I demand that this practice stop immediately!
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I looked high and low on their site, trying to determine how to erase my (long unused) account. Finally, I had to e-mail them, and they got back to me yesterday. To remove your account, simply e-mail:
account-close@amazon.com
There were no further instructions, so I assume that the removal is done manually by an Amazonling. I used this:
To Whom It May Concern,
Please remove my account from your system. I haven't purchased anything
from you since your 1-click & referral patents, but now that you've modified
your privacy statement to permit the sale of my private information, it's
time to remove my account. Please remove any data that you have under
waldo@waldo.net and waldo@munkandphyber.com, and notify me when you have
done so. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Waldo L. Jaquith
I guess that's sufficient. I encourage all of you to close your accounts, though you'd do well to cite today's news in addition to the modification of their privacy statement.
-Waldo
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The same is true accross the different Amazon sites. For example, I looked for a CD on www.amazon.co.uk and was quoted £15.99 with a 4-6 week delivery (ie normal - non stock timing). Looking at the new www.amazon.fr site, the same CD was only £9.98 which even when adding Europe wide carriage is still less than the UK site, and having ordered it (from France) it was shipped less than 6 hours later.
This very thing has happened to me. When I went back to the shelf with the Manager, I found 3 different prices on the same book. Now, I'm forced to look very carefully at every copy of the book I'm buying, and grab the lowest priced one. It's a "buyer beware" world, deal with it...
The catalogs are not postcode separated. I know this because we get a list of addresses, in a particular location. These span multiple postcodes, and the whole range of areas, right from really scummy parts up to veritable mansion houses.
The catalogs were then collected from large pallets of catalogs stacked at one side, and one delivered per address.
Each catalog did _not_ have a specifc address.
There was no way of making certain catalogs targeted to certain area. [0]
[0] There _were_ differnt catalogs target at different markets, but that's very different from the topic at hand.
It wouldn't be tough for Amazon to recognize the browsing habits of a bot, and "personalize" the prices it sees to be much more competitive than what they might offer the average customer. This seems like it should be illegal, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be...
Different prices for different people have existed forever. Frequent shopper cards, Buy x Get y free discounts, sales, special handshakes, etc.
:)
Amazon isn't doing anything new, in fact, they're not even the first to do dynamic pricing on the Internet. However, their investors are pissed that Amazon is _still_ losing money, and they haven't had any PR for a while.
Thus, the new pricing schemes. How many people have already gone to Amazon.com to see if they qualify for a low price? How many of those people bought stuff because they felt 3l33t with their "lower" prices?
This is simply another cheesy ploy by Amazon, pity the fools who fell for it
-This sig intentionally left blank
Not in the UK
In the UK the major home shopping catalouge firms are all part of the Littlewoods group (Though not all).
A summer job as a delivery driver for that group demonstrates quite clearly that the catalouges are all the same.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
yet you intend to keep reading slashdot?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Offers in the street. Here in Melbourne, you can get a "Starter Kit" (they call it that), containing a needle and a cap of heroin (or whatever you call it) for about $2.50 US. The amount of people begging on the streets who are obviously drugged to their eyeballs is a reasonable hint at the fact they charge a bit higher than that when they know you can't change your mind.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Try doing that on your $99 fare.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Well they could still track your IP. So to be totally anonymous you will need a dynamic IP as well.
I would think that the number of people who *didn't* buy the product would be very important. You could make a graph showing "50% of the people shown price X bought the product, 35% of the people shown price Y bought it, and 75% of the people shown price Z bought it." If an unknown number of people visit the site with no intention of buying anything, it throws those numbers off. If you don't record the non-buyers, all you can say is "30% of the people who bought the product paid price X, 25% paid price Y, and 45% paid price Z." I havn't taken econ since high school, but the first one seems much more valuable to me.
-B
I Occasionally shop at Amazon, and usually I don't bother to compare prices elsewhere.
Now I will. They will surly lose some of my business.
How fast till someone comes with a script to automatically compression shop in Amazon against it self?
The original post was long winded, mean spirited, and not very clever. For the poster to call anyone "a dumb, loud-mouthed boor" was funny. People with problems project their faults on others and it shows in the insults they throw.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The logical and commercially viable solution here is to lower the price when you buy a lot, because they want to maintain that customer loyalty if it means you're a good buyer. Same way it works with everything else... Buy 1, it's a given price; buy 100, it's a lot cheaper per unit.
I suspect you guys will whine a lot less if this kind of data collection means you'll save on your little anime DVDs, huh?
I do my research at Amazon and then go to BestBookBuys.com, which searches some 20 or 30 book retailers (including Amazon) and gives you a list of how much your particular book would cost (including shipping!) from each place. A good quick way to comparison shop, which is one thing the internet is great at.
Ummm, ok. whatever. We currently have articles going back to the beginning of 1999 online, same as always. Presumably you are refering to the pre-99 articles, which have been offline for a couple of months now for technical / cost reasons. completely unofficially, I can tell you that they are likely to be back soon (another month or two at most.) We all want the old articles back. Usenet @ Deja never went away.
And as far as being a "portal", no, obviously we are not a general purpose portal like Yahoo, Excite, and so on, and not even really a "shopping portal" per se. Yes, we have links to vendors sites, but they are organized around specific products. In other words, you don't come to Deja.com and get pushed towards a few merchants sites, maybe based on broad categories. You use our services to find the actual product(s) you want and then you are presented with a list of links we have gathered to specific product pages. (IE, linking directly into the merchant's specific product page.) If you want to call this a 'portal', fine, use whatever word you like. I just can't figure out why what we do seems to bother you so much.
Reminds me of McDonalds in Paris. The price of a Happy Meal varies depending on where you intend to eat; inside the restaruant, out on the sidewalk or just carry out.
Although I also expect to see more of this (movie rentals, PPV, etc.) I also agree that you don't have to put up with it and can go somewhere else (for now).
But this has indeed become standard practice on arilines and in hotels. The consumer gets to shop for the lowest price he can pay given the concessions he is willing to make (2 week advance purchase-non refundable, etc.) Don't see any real issue with other products and services going this way, as long as the prices are not fixed (as they seem to be on airlines - last time I went out on business, all the major carrier's flights were all within about $10.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Great response! I'm amazed by all the whiny hand-wringing here that "someone out there may have gotten a better deal than I did, and it's not faaaaair!" - just like a three year old.
We each strike our own bargains and have no right to complain later just because someone may have gotten a slightly better deal.
That last verse (15) should really be taken to heart by the crowd here.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Remember when Amazon gave out $10 off certificates? But if people bought stuff at $10 or under, they would get it for free. Until Amazon stopped it to a minimum $10 order?
:) It should be just as easy to issue a refund!
Anyway, if I go to a Local Store, they have different UPC codes for Diet Caffine Free Coke. One UPC rings up as $1.09 and the other for $0.99. Same 16.9 Oz bottle, two different prices. Just keyed in. If I get charged $1.09 I can show the $0.99 price and ask to speak to a manager to get the price adjusted. I think that Amazon needs a "price check" feature in case a customer has a problem. Thing is, unless you complain to them about it, they won't catch it. It obviously is a data entry error, most likely the same item with a different item number or sku number.
Remember "Buyer Beware" and they already got your credit card number when you ordered!
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I'm having a tough time figuring out what's so wrong with this. If I decide I want to buy a Ferrari, I'm going to have a tough time getting one. But if a Ferrari collector, a loyal customer, wants to buy one, he's going to be able to get it a lot cheaper than I would. Ok, so a DVD != Italian sports car, but my point is that retailers are allowed to set a price anywhere they want. It's economics. There is nothing preventing me from going to any other store and buying the DVD or - horror of all horrors - deciding that the benefits don't outweigh the costs and not buying the thing at all!
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
This kind of thing happens every day. Pick up a current issue of any magazine directed toward IT management and you will see that WalMart has one of the largest databases of customer buying habits. WalMart only stocks their shelves with things that sell. It's weird how they make you give them your driver's license number if you pay with a check, and if you use a credit card, well.... This is just taking it a little farther--PERSONALIZED marketing. I don't know if it is bad or good, but if it's bad, some one should stop WalMart. It's interesting, also, that they don't have to tell you they are tracking your buying habits, even though this could be a potential invasion of privacy. Sure you are just a number, but we are all just numbers, and how easy is it to turn a name into a number??
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The way you phrase this, it sounds like you pay label price on everything you buy.
No I don't. Again, we are not talking about one's ability to try to convince a salesperson or manager to give a discount. We are talking about official policy of a company that refuses to reveal the criteria. To me the issue is clear, if they revealed how they were doing this I would have no problem with it.
yet another way to turn customers off from amazon, i shall continue doing business with dvd empire._ _______________
________________________________________
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
For instance, here are 14+ different choices for buying The Matrix on DVD sorted by price.
We're continually adding new merchants and product categories all the time. That's my job actually. In fact, if you know of any good DVD merchants (or any other good web merchants actually) feel free to send suggestions to me in email (see above) and I will look at putting them on our site. (Note that not every web merchant will be able to be listed -- if they have really crappy inconsistent HTML and/or don't list enough identifying information on their pages, it won't work. Perl regexp's are neat but not magical ;-))
Maybe it's annoying that one has to write a perl script to harvest cookies when they could have given us their minimum price in the first place. In general, it makes shopping more time consuming, that's all.
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For "bulk pricing" at a place like Amazon, you'd be surely talking HUGE volume, no less. Not 20, not 100 - probably more into the hundreds or more.
(7) Become a new customer every time you make a purchase!
That's all I have to say. If you don't wanna bother price shopping then you probably don't really mind spending the extra dollars... If it's something I want I'll shop around for it... If it's something that I wouldn't wanna spend time shopping for, maybe I shouldn't be paying for it anyways...
The first hit is free, after that, the price jacks up. What they do with quantity or more likely cutting the stuff is probably as constant as the price hike. First high-quality free hit to get you hooked, perhaps a few more good quality ones at a given price $n, and then quality-- and n++.
But at some point quality and n become constant as they've hit market values. Drug dealers don't have a monopoly over you, just usually the drug.
Don't you love capitalism? It even keeps the drug dealers honest!! :-)
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Cant you just disable cookies in your browser? Then Amazon wont know who you are until you enter your credit card details, and you should get the price first then...
Baz
I recently spent $ 191 at amazon.com and they gave me the lower price on the Men in Black DVD.
However, they messed up my $191 order - they sent it late and one of the items they sent was the wrong one. I don't really want to complain since it's not worth the trouble of shipping it back, but I doubt I'll buy from them again.
D
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They even change their price depending on which browser etc you use... Have a look at this
Very few trading cultures actually have a concept of 'set price.' Most of them are entirely haggling/bargining based.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I do not get it. This is normal practice for normal non-online stores. They analyse customer demand all the time. Some of them have evn gone as far as analyzing customer in store movement using IR cameras. Why do you expect Amazon to behave differently. Just because it is online? ;-) They are just doing business the way everyone else does. A bit more efficiently though as they do not need IR cameras to track customer movements.
Gimme a break
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
amazon doens't have your credit card number of type or name while you're filling your shopping cart, only afterwards when you sign in your info or use a previously entered profile. or rather, the only way amazon can have a clue who you are is with cookies from previous sessions. so rename your cookie file and try again; if you get a better deal, great; if you get a worse one, you can always put your cookies back.
I don't know if I can full-heartedly agree with your assessment, especially with your recommendations.
A business is not doing anyone a favor if it does not maximize it's profits. It cannot continue to offer you a service, it cannot continue to survive and feed/pay itself, it cannot gain prestive, position, rank, or brand, if it cannot stay in business.
What is *wrong* with different prices for different buyers? I'm not saying more or less, but under what premise is equality of prices a guarantee? If you don't want to pay *more*, then go buy somewhere else. If you don't want to pay *less*, then there must be something wrong with you, I think.
As per the price fluctiations, there are several 'arguments' for. There is no real value assigned to, say, a book. It's value is only whatever a person is willing to pay for it. If that's 25, 26, 28, or 30, that's the 'price'. If you find it for 30, but want to pay 25, then you aren't going to buy it, and they won't sell it. If, however, they will sell it for 25, but you're willing to pay 30, they would be *stupid* for charging less.
Amazon, with this practice, can maximize profits. That's not wrong.
Another issue I can think of is the 'perishability' of their goods. Anything that sits in their warehouse over a certain amount of time is, essentially, a loss. Books that get printed every quarter, year, or even week; the circulation of books, like the circulation of money, is how they make a profit. If they sell 2000 books a month, and get 2000 books in every month, they have 0 inventory, and profit on 2000 books. If they sell 200 books a month, and get 200 books a month, they still have 0 inventory, but only profit on 200 books. It's to their advantage to maintain 0 inventory, before the next shipment comes in, and if that means lowering prices, well, then, it's certainly in their advantage.
As to raising prices, one can *always* go somewhere else. But the assumption is that you're paying money to Amazon to keep them alive. Brand loyalty means you like them, for whatever reason, and if you want them to suceed, you buy from them over, say B&N. If you have no loyalty, then it doesn't matter anyway. Which means you pay a brand tax; and, if they are smart, they use that profit to do something good, to ensure current and new buyers *prefer* Amazon over B&N. If they do something stupid or pointless, or irritating, customers can always leave.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Adam Smith's invisible hand will pimp-slap Amazon's foolishness....
Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com
Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com
Two peanuts crossed the street. One was assaulted.
It's sometimes called beha vioural marketing. It's also called knowing your customer. Supporting this kind of marketing is a burgeoning business for a lot of web companies. The idea is that you track what happens on your site via web, db, phone logs. You segment your visitors according to criteria you make up or you discern from your logs. Aand you devise promotions and marketing programs to attract and retain the customers you really want, and help them get beyond shopping to buying. Duh.
Amazon is not alone in pursuing this strategy. And the article offers almost devoid of factual data on the particulars of Amazon's program. If you want to boycott Amazon, go ahead. They won't care - unless you spend lots of time browsing but never buying. But doing it as a result of this non-information is pretty foolish.
Not the same thing--the comparison would be like Walmart changing the prices on the items at the check-out based on what my "profile". The guy ahead of me in line gets a discount, but I pay full price for the same item.
I'm not an Amazon basher, BTW. I shop there quite a bit and, in fact, just received some stuff. It disturbs me, however, especially in light of their having "wish lists" and "favorites" as well as my previous purchases that they could find out what I'm likely to buy and jack up the price.
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores ...The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
... that's pretty standard practice in most areas of the world, actually. Hell, even here it is. For any large expense at a retail store, I'll find whoever has authority to cut a deal and I'll cut a deal with them. As long as you can convince them it won't get out, pretty much anybody prefers cash in hand to inventory on the shelf, lowered profit or not.
:)
Ummmm
If I can size up the store and try to chew them down, what on earth is wrong with vice versa?
The way you phrase this, it sounds like you pay label price on everything you buy. You're kidding, right? Are there REALLY people that dumb in the world?
In the old days, the main way that Barnes and Noble sold books was by the B+N catalog (and if you ever bought from them...you would likely still have a couple dozen hidden in your house somewhere.) The B+N catalog had differential pricing in it, in order to purchase an item from them, you had to give them your catalog number. I noticed that the catalogs I would get would have different prices in them from the catalogs my father got, although they did look the same.
Several years ago I was watching...uhh...think it was Montel, as I was flipping through the channels. They had some consumer expert come on and talk about differential pricing in Victoria's Secret catalogs. It wasn't making a big difference unless you spent a huge sum of money. They had this weird example of how one person would save $100 if she bought $500 worth of clothing from one catalog instead of another.
What's deeply funny to me is the way that they scandalized such a good, family, American institution like Victoria's Secret. And I don't care how much lingerie someone owns, they likely do not buy that much of it.
Phew, I was worried for a moment there - I thought you were monitoring me!
Obviously, using Microsoft software identifies you as a sucker. I wonder if they also ship you the defective merchandise returned by other people...
The name of the game seems to be comparison shopping. Why hasn't anyone started a service on the web that, for a small fee (or advertising revenue) will find you the best possible price on the web (given your profile, which would be independently tracked by this service)? I know services like pricescan and streetprices are available, but they are limited and don't take advantage of any customization, the use by retailers of which people are freaking out about.
I think this "two-click" approach would work - one click for the best price, another to buy. It would hopefully end up being a web middleman that would be worth using if it consistently got you lower prices.
just my blog and pix
I think the point of the whole exercise is to fleece people who they see as gormless.
:)
There's an IE5 user... he obviously doesn't have too much discretion,
there's an AOL user, he obviously can't think for himself, let's charge him 20% more
oh oh... there's a li... no, even I'm not prepared to whore that much
Remember the hawaiian shirt in nethack? using IE is like wearing that.
Bricks and mortar stores do this all the time, from store to store, week to week or region to region. The only reason you notice is on Amazon is that it's easy to compare, what with price-finding bots and discussion boards. It's not unethical, or even unusual. Indeed, it's optimal, because it finds the pricing sweet-spot that both encourages consumer purchasing and keeps Amazon in business. This is called efficient capitalism, and that's what e-commerce was supposed to be all about.
Slightly offtopic.. but try looking at Netscape.com's browser download page in IE.. I'm running IE 5.5 .. and I get 'Browser Upgrade Available! Netscape 4.75'..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It's a very standard business process with hotel/motel rooms. If your looking around, haggle, and plenty rooms were available, you could get a lower price. If there was an event in town that would bring in hoards of people, then prices would go up. It's not illegal to change prices at all. The problem people see with it in the United States, in particular, is that they think haggling is not honest. In other cultures if you do not haggle you considered an idiot, and in still others the merchant may be insulted.
The persons that need the starter can haggle, the person selling the starter can charge more. Unfortunately the majority of companies attitudes are like "this is the price, take it or leave it" So sometimes it get's left, and the person goes down the road and says "<so-n-so> wanted 'x' amount for a starter, what can you get me one for?"
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Sure, it would be possible to offer discounts for bulk purchases... but that's not guarantee that Amazon will do it. It's all about psycology, I guess.
---
In our technologically backward area, there is a supermarket that uses those lovely remote control LCD price tags. All prices can be changed from a central location at will. What I found out from a female acquaintance who used to work there is that managment regularly changes the price of certain merchandise not only weekly but as often as several times a day in some cases. Soda, chips, and beer goes up in price a couple of hours before the football game comes on and then back down after halftime. You get the drift. Its all about maximizing profit by altering price to reflect supply v. demand on a very precise time scale. It may be irritating but it does make sense from a profit perspective.
With services such as Priceline and EBay, we've seen the ability for buyers and sellers to come to a private agreement about pricing.
Perhaps fixed prices are a thing of the past, a relic of the old ways of doing business. Fixed prices are certainly needed at old-style bricks-and-mortar retail establishments (so the customer can quickly view the price while examining an item) but really aren't required online, where the webserver software can issue a different pricetag for each viewer.
In the future Retail Online Hell, massive server databases will track our every choice, become aware of our every weakness, and know what "must-have" preferences each of us has.
The result: I'll be charged top dollar for things like DVDs, and offered astonishingly cheap prices for, say, scented candles.
But there are also people who will "walk away". And the company would probably rather may a 50c profit than not make the $1 they were originally hoping for.
Of course, this brings us nicely back to the RIAA where people who are walking away are walking away to Napster. If the record companies lowered their prices, they would probably get a lot of these people to come back to purchasing but they may actually end up making less money because the hoards of Brittney fans would be paying slightly less each.
What they can't seem to understand though is that even if they could shut Napster and friends down, those "walk aways" still won't walk back.
Anyway, I digress...
Rich
And how do you feel about airlines charging different prices for seats on the the same airplane? It (basically) amounts to the same thing.
Amazon is trying to optimize each transaction. If they can charge a higher price for something and have it sell as well, it increases their profits. They aren't in business just to provide /. with story fodder, after all.
If the price they set is too high for you, go someplace else. One of the great things about the internet is that it's easy to go someplace else.
Interesting. This sounds like Walmart's "roll back" prices on speed. Imagine walking by a rack of cloths and the digital price display goes from $5 to $3 when you say the shirt is ugly, but you listen to a Stereo and comment on how good it shoulds the price jumps by $50.
btw..... I wonder how the German govt. is gonna react to this. Isn't this kind of thing (changing prices randomly) illegal in Germany?
Burn Hollywood Burn
to clarify: iirc., amazon.com didn't explicitly indicate that their intentions were to sell the information, just to notify customers that further use of Amazon.com implies that you have granted them permission to sell your customer data, as specified in the privacy policy.
Mail-order catalogs have been doing this for decades. Your catalog looks just like the one your next-door neighbor got, but all your prices are higher. Slimy, but common, and it'll get more common as consumer data-mining techniques get more refined. Jack it up a dollar if your income is over $100K, and another dollar if your past buying indicates a lack of price discrimination.
You don't know what to think of it? I do--it stinks.
Can they do this? Sure. Is this common? Absolutely--it's been done for decades in the real world. Fast food chains are particularly bad for setting prices differently in different areas of a city. We call this "DEMOGRAPHIC PRICING," and the only think that Amazon has done differently is increasing the level of detail/granularity on which they can apply it. Instead of getting people based on their home or work district (and hence, their approximate income, job type, general lifestyle, etc.) they can do it by specific individual attributes.
It could be used for good purposes, but in this case as in most, there's no profit in good behaviour. It's sleazy and wrong, and should encourage us customers to research _every_ purchase we make over some 'throwaway' threshold.
Eventually this will jump up and bite the companies back. Continual comparison shopping and distrust of retailers means no brand/store loyalty, no sense of responsibility, and no loss when the companies die.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The poster says he won't support amazon because of the one click shopping fiasco, but openly buys Anime DVDs and supports that atrocity??
It's no wonder we have trouble fighting the dvd battle when we have a section of people willing to turn the other cheeks so they can get the product they want. It's time to start sticking togethor, if we keep adding to the dvd market, we might as well give up on the DeCSS case right now.
Well, I do. It's screwing the business people, and their purchasing departments, as well as the casual last-minute travelers - not because the price reflects higher costs but because they can. Sure, costs are a little higher because there's a higher risk of unsold seats, but certainly not by a factor of 4 as is common on some transcon routes.
Amazon is clearly trying to do the same thing, and for that reason alone I'm less willing to buy from them.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
If you read the DVD board, somebody said that while he was not logged in, with cookies disabled, and a netscape cache of maximum 0 size, Amazon fluctuated the prices up and then dropped them. There doesn't seem to be any reasonable criteria dependent on the person. Either random, or raising the price each time to "scare" people into buying it early before it goes higher.
That's just plain dishonest. While you may have special discounts because you are a teacher or have some frequent customer program which has a written out set of rules, it is completely dishonest for a store, for instance, to randomly change prices on people who didn't even want to opt-in.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
That's right...Krazy Karl's Karma profiles are now available! $5 per point. Buy 50 points, and win a free kidney!
It is, it is, a glorious thing to be a Pirate King!
ACtually, they use 2 tricks, one is look at the UPC, the product _MIGHT_ come with one on it already, it's not uncommon for this UPC to already be in use, with a possible combiantion of only a few million unique UPCs on some products ( a soda UPC symbol from pepsi has 6 charachters, all numeric, always) and the hundreds of billions of products out there, UPCs are virtually worthless. Furthermore, Walmart's UPC system may not always be compatible with the manufacturers UPC (compare the UPC on a can of soda with that of the UPC on a book which should belive (not looking) have 12 space for "store use" tho many times manu. UPCs are for inhouse inventory. many companies reprint UPCs, or use a diffrent form of barcoding all together (Best Buys, Hastings, and others I cant see from here) So it's very VERY possible that walmart could manipulate prices from store to store, dept. to dept. even register to register (tho the legal implications of that would probably keep it from happening) I dont see how anyone on /. could ever really be so nieve as to think that computers are unable to be used to screw custyomers over. Afterall, it's just numbers, depends on how you use the computer to interpret them.
-Doug
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
Rich
http://www.wired.com/news/b usiness/0,1367,38622,00.html
It's true about Amazon changing prices. I bought the Jet Li 4 DVD box set from Amazon 2 days ago at $70, and I went again to the website today, and the exact same box set was listed for $17. I cancelled the other order and just bought it at $17 and got the receipt for it. It's legit. If you like Jet Li, I recommend buying it now. It's originally a $100 box set. So, they changed the price radically in a couple days.
Your examples are, a bit misleading, StoryMan. If Amazon is truly changing prices based on what browser you're using to shop the site, that'd be more like Barnes & Noble charging you 10% less on your purchase of Pagan Babies because you drove there in a Ford while the person in front of you, who drove a Chevy, paid the full price.
Oldthink thinkcrime doubleplus ungood
I read this from someone who bought a lot of Anime on DVD.
1) Buy from Express.com for pre-orders.
2) Buy from Buy.com for existing DVD's.
3) Check against 800.com, amazon.com, etc.
Usually the first two work for me. The others rarely beat those two.
Yeah, I know. But the concept of set price is inherently flawed. A book does not have an absolute value. Amazon is now experimenting with that concept, it looks like. Lets just hope they do it in the correct direction....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Couldn't one 'tweak' the cookie to defeat the biased pricing scheme. Something like, "insert these values into your cookie and you'll be guaranteed the lowest prices available"!
It is only a matter of time before Amazon's preferences are uncovered. Just watch out for the ensuing lawsuit.
I assume that Amazon wants to confuse the hell outa comparison search spiders and database builders. You cannot that way search for the price ... l4m3rZ
and get it there the next time you go, It all depends on a set of cookies you have
Don't let Amazon Fsck With You.
I almost bought some items there, but we have
a local book store that gives 20% off books, so
I just shop there. 20% off preordered books as well! Who needs online when I can get real people to help me offline! Besides if you insist, use Amazon with cookies off, and search for a particular ISBN of the book and preorder it... it will arrive at the book store in less than a week!
I am sure that every major city has those.
The practice of charging arbitrary prices based on how gullible a person seems has been around for ages -- just think of the last time (at least in the US) that you went looking for a car at a dealership. The only difference here is that it's impossible to haggle (unless you're willing to use different browsers, play with the cookies cached, and so on... average "Joe User" isn't going to do those things or even know that he should). While giving certain good customers discounts is good business practice, in this case these customers need to know that they've been selected for discounts, or else the entire effect is lost.
---
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Amazon's experiment may show that a lower price will result in many more sales and a bigger total profit. Or conversly, Amazon may find out that most DVD shoppers are not price-sensitive, and raise the price to make more profit.
For me, it is a win-win situation. If Amazon has a lower price, I save money. If Amazon has a higher price, I'll buy from somewhere else cheaper. I typically use some kind of price comparison tool before I purchase. Only an idiot would make a purchase for one price and get mad when they found out they could have bought it cheaper somewhere else.
Everything in this post is false.
At the heart of the problem: Information Collection. Marketers touted it continually as a favor to consumers. Give them what they want. Target things to them. What they don't realize is just because I buy their product doesn't mean they're doing me a favor. Just because I see a product I want doesn't mean this. And especially when you engage in the standard marketing practices of deception and trying to use the customer for everything you can, are you not doing me a favor. I had even begun trusting Amazon.com. But their prices were usually higher than other stores, so I'd get things elsewhere. Amazon is going to have to try even harder for my business now. Companies just don't understand that trustworthiness is everything. Real trustworthiness.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I've never heard the expression "chew them down" for bargaining. Is it possible this is a cleaned-up "Jew them down"
... there ARE no Jews in rural BC so there's nothing to be anti about -- local racism is reserved for Indians, er, First Nations people :)
"chew" is a fairly common replacement for "talk" in rural BC where I grew up. As in "Whacha doin? Chewin' wit porges," y'know, eh? I'm quite sure it's just from that and has no anti-Semitic connotations whatsoever. It quite certainly wasn't used like that there
Okay, I'd always thought one of the best attributed of shopping on the net was the ability to compare prices, usually by going to a comparison website. This makes me worry, though, because given the precedent set by e-bay when it went after those auction sites that were linking to it, couldn't Amazon try to do the same thing to these comparison sites?
In the past, I wasn't particularly worried about this, because those sites usually helped online retailers make sales. Now, though, if personal pricing becomes a trend, I could see retailers wanting to keep users away from these sites.
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
walk away
Yes, that's the point. Normally you have to set the price and accept that some people will walk away, while some people would have paid more. So to do that well, you need accurate elasticity information. That's one thing they are measuring. The curve of the set of demand vs price points. But if they can generate these curves on a per-demographic basis, they are all set.
On a less preachy note, I can't seem to figure out why the profit is maximised at the meeting point. Instead it should be the point that maximes the area of the rectangle between it and the origin. And I can easily draw a demand curve where that is not at the intersection. Ideas?
This reminds me of an experiment that coke performed a while a ago. They had vending machines that would fluctuate the price of drinks depending on the time and the temperature. So if it was 100 degrees and in the middle of rush hour it would charge more than when it was cool and between breakfast and lunch. This kind of selling is pretty strange in our society where haggling and such other things are not the norm anymore.
On a random note. I wonder what would happen if you used another browser than IE or Netscape.
Unfortunately, under a so-called "free market" system, Amazon has the right to raise or lower prices at whim. They can charge more when they find out you're a regular, but lower the price just enough to beat barnesandnoble.com if they think they might lose your business.
It's unethical. It's wrong. And it's not fair to consumers.
Government regulation has such a bad rap to USians, but it's undeserved. Really, who is better suited to determine fair market value than our own democratically-elected leaders? It's time for we the people to take control of the market and bring some fairness to the table.
We already grant these companies welfare in the form of loans and tax incentives. Look how they treat us in return. We have to regain control.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
The internet makes it a lot easier for the buyer to browse different prices, without having to pull out of the parking lot, drive to the next store, and find another parking spot. OTOH, it also makes it easier for the store to know what items you looked at and what you lingered over and what you put in your shopping cart before changing your mind - and they'd be fools not to use the information!
Brings to mind the proverb, "Be careful what you wish for -- it might just be granted..."
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Here in the UK, if you leave stuff in your shopping basket at dabs.com, when you next access your basket, they'll tell you if any prices have gone up or down. Nice :)
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
This is another technique businesses can use now that they couldn't use before the Internet. They can optimize profits by not only figuring out what is the most a person in general will pay, but what different kinds of people can pay. At the same time, we're still free to find whatever store offers the best price/service value. Capitalism at its finest.
From an economic standpoint, amazon are trying to get a handle on the price elasticity of their various goods, perhaps correctly reasoning that tried and true items like Planet of the Apes will be more elastic than hot-off-the-press X-Men (if it's even out yet).
BUT! The normal supply/demand relationships implicitly assume an anonymous purchaser, so the elasticity is some aggregate measure. Of course, that isn't the case when you mix cookies into it (cue ominous strings)
We all know that the seller maximises profit at the intersection of supply/demand vs price curves (elasticity is the slope of the curve). However, for any given price, there are people who are paying "too little". They would gladly pay more for the same product.
If amazon could work demographics into the elasticity estimate -- and this is why they (and double-click) have been collecting info, not for advertising -- they can make better estimate on the maximum price that an individual would pay for the product.
So what they are doing is trying to determine the price sensitivity to various products for various demographic clusters.
I am absolutely amazed. If this is done on a cross industry basis (so instead of just books, also cars, airfare) this is consumer data that companies will kill for.
Or buy amazon for, now that it is a sellable asset
I'm actually really excited about this. It is soo neat. This is a great hack! Evil, despicable and all that too, but neat!
This is nothing new. Perhaps on the online world this is just starting to get noticed, but in that world outside (yes, the place past the window with blackout curtains over it) large warehouse and depeartment stores have done this for years. Go into any Home Repot or Walmart and look at the POS items, they're the ones up at the register. not sure how they determine which will be priced high and low (sales figures? astrological data? speaking gerbil??) but almost always you can find those items in the store cheaper or more exspensive. Same holds true for items that may fit diffrent departments, IE clear coat spray paint might be in the arts and crafts area, homewares, and paint areas (at walmart this is true) and they vary in price by as much as a dollar... :)
my 2
-Doug
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
And, yes, you are right: this isn't new to Internet-based sales. Phone companies and others have been doing it for years. That doesn't make it right.
Efficient markets rely on orderly transactions. That's true in the stock market as well as in the consumer market. The more these kinds of practices take hold, the less transparent pricing becomes, the less efficient the market gets. And that's ultimately bad for the economy.
Ohh ofcourse.... It's a feature...
//gs or Commodore 64... Forget it... If on show "Survivers" User would build entertainment center (including Play Station 2) out of trees...
They scan for than Microsoft IE flag and say "Ohh Windows... they'll pay more"
Go in with Linux... MASIVE discounts...
Uses IE/Windows... Will pay top price for infereor quality.. dosn't do research..
Uses Linux/Knoquer... Will not pay a for anything unless price is dirt cheap...
AT&T 3B2/Lynx... Won't even buy new computer if old one still works... Y2K bugs ignored...
Apple
Timelord Os... Sell antques... user is time travler.. everything is antques anyway...
I don't actually exist.
Look up the price _first_, before they know who you are. If they don't allow this, then create a couple of false logins that you never buy anything with to use for price checking.
If you find that the price goes up after you log in, the lodge a complaint. You may want to save printouts, etc, of the different price listings.
Personally I will NEVER buy anything online until/unless there is a means of payment that:
1. Doesn't reveal identifying information I would rather keep private. All of the methods of payment I am aware of violate this.
2. Doesn't give control of the transaction to the payee. Credit/Debit cards and 'electronic check' all do this. I want a POSITIVE means of controlling both the transaction and the amount, without relying on any trust of the payee. I want to tell MY financial institution (which only has access to funds I deposit in person or at an ATM - and NOT any cash I hold on my person), to make payment, of a specific amount, to a specific recipient, when *I* specify. I do not want to give a payee any opportunity to charge me a different amount, or continue charging me after I cancel a service, or take my money at a different time.. etc..
3. Doesn't require me to be using 'credit' to pay, but instead permits me to pay with funds I already have. Debit card and 'electronic check' fulfill this, but many places permit ONLY credit cards. I will *NEVER* have or use a credit card becuase not only does that give control of a transaction to a merchant, provides too muchprivate information, and also permits them to not only take all the money I have, but money I DONT have- basically taking out a loan in my name on their say-so.
I've recently suggested to PayPal/X.COM that they start producing and distributing pre-paid cards (much like pre-paid calling cards or gas cards), that one could purchase at stores. I havent received anything beyond their form-letter response, but I am somewhat hopeful. This would really be the ultimate in giving control back to the consumer - anonymous (eg - PRIVATE) electronic payment. A clerk at McDonalds doesnt know who you are when you hand them a fiver - why should online stores have any right to (under some excuse of 'security')
Good lord how dare Amazon.com follow a supply/demand model? You mean to tell me that if there is demand (but limited supply) on a particular item that they are raising the price? Personally, I am outraged. I think I should set the price for everything I buy (or steal, in the case of MP3s). I haven't heard of anything this crazy since freshman econ.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Actually, they do this to make you buy more. The funny thing is that people don't buy based on the best price, they buy on the catchiest price. Also, if something is more expensive it is 'better'.
This doesn't work for everything, but that is why they test prices -- to find the price that they will sell the most of a particular product at. Sometimes pricing stuff higher works better. They are not doing this to rip you off (ie raise the prices when you want it based on your purchase history).
In reality, when a company like amazon sees that you have been purchasing a lot of stuff, they want you to purchase more so they are going to send you coupons and special offers and such. They want you to buy and 'ripping you off' is not going to make you buy..
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
Come on guys, they have a hard enough time actually making money, they have to try whatever it may take to hopefully eventually reach a break-even point. If you feel sorry for them, put up with their slight price fluctuations or send donations to Bezos. If you don't feel sorry for them, then just don't shop with them and let nature take its course, they'll be gone in a year or so if enough people refuse to shop there...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Many retailers sell the same items to differnt folks at different prices, based on various criteria (why do you think mail-order houses ask you for a catalog number as well as a customer number), and no one cares - I remember several years ago Victorias Secret was caught doing this - it made the news, but no one cared...
What is the problem, really?
You go to Amazon, they quote you a price, that is the price you pay if you decide to buy.
If you look today and it is $X, and then you return tomorrow and the price is $X+1 (or even $X-1), what is the harm?
Now, if the price of items changed in your "shopping basket," that would be worth talking about...
But they don't.
Puh-leeze!
Ken
However, I don't see how this is really different from buying a car. I would pissed if someone else got an incredible deal on a new car and I payed $2000 more, but I know of other people that have payed the first price on a car with little negotiations. Plus, I'm sure that many of you guys have haggled a bit on the price of computer, stereo system or even rent.
Try addall, otherwise known as bookarea. Checks about 32 online book dealers, adds shipping, subtracts current coupons, and lists all prices for your perusal. Wonderful service!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Imagine I buy a lot of Anime DVDs. They could note this, and raise the prices by a buck or something.
I hate to tell you, but that's one of the underlying laws of economics. If something is in demand, the price will go to what the market will support, i.e. what people are willing to pay. It's been a while since I took an economics class, so maybe someone else can explain it better.
--
You can't charge two customers differnt prices, its called price fixing. This happened in the railroad monopoly days. Maximize your profits "per customer".
How about:
Why do women get paid less for doing the same job as a man?
Why do a pair of women's jeans (typically less raw material) cost 1.5-3 times as much as men's jeans?
Why does an Acura Integra cost 1.5 times as much as the Honda Accord, a fairly identical car, the only meaningful difference being the sheet metal and name badge? (never mind the Cadillac Catera and the Chevy Cavalier!)
Why does an audio cassette of an album cost $10, while the CD costs $18, even though the cassette costs about $2 to reproduce, and the CD about 5 cents?
Why does a VW fan belt for an old beetle cost about 1/10 of what the SAME EXACT PART for a Porsche 356 cost?
Things cost what stupid sheeple will pay for them.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is common practice. RealStore regularly does this as well: Products are spammed with different price points to see where the "sweet spot" is. Obviously, the sweet spot is typically somewhere between selling lots of product at a giveway price and selling no product at exhorbitant prices.
Don't even get me started on banking.
Based on the money I have now (stock options) that I didn't have 5 years ago, the banks treat me like royalty now, they know me by name, etc. But it didn't use to be like this - I can bounce checks now, and they give me the benefit of the doubt for a day or two, but man, a few years ago, I could deposit money in the morning, write a check in the evening, bounce it, and rack up a buttload of fees.
I'm tellin ya man, they FUCK you at the drive thru!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
IANAL, much less an anti-trust lawyer, but isn't this a pretty gross violation of the Robinson-Pattman Act? (In the US anyway). Not that Robinson-Pattman is ever enforced (or could ever be enforced for that matter), but this one seems a bit blatent.
sPh
IANAL, but I could have sworn there were laws around this sort of price discrimination, and that they were broader than the protections of the '64 Civil Rights Act. If so, it would have caught my attention during the original public concerns when stores stopped pricing items and started using scanners may have been an influence.
If I'm not misremembering (and my memory is very vague on this), public retailers are required to: a) post prices for merchandise (which is where Amazon can weasle around, because posting was expected to be *public*, not privately tailored), and b) charge no more than the posted price for merchandise.
If there are any legal experts who can refute or verify any such laws (preferably with links), I'd certainly like to know.
"The girl makes Godot look punctual." -- Buffy
Sadly, this is simply an online implementation of a VERY old practice....Victoria's Secret has had something like 3 to 5 catalogs out at any one time, broken out according to zip codes and past buying habits. I've actually gotten two different catalogs from them--they look identical but the prices are different.
Ditto for pricing in supermarket chains...same chain, different branch, different prices.
The nature of cookies, buying patterns, and the Web (remember, pixels are cheaper than paper) means that you'll probably see more of this rather than less in the future...it may pay to surf at such places in a non-signed in state and then sign in to purchase....or add stuff to your cart unsigned in and then sign in just to check out...
OTOH I am SOOOO happy I discovered Fatbrain when I did....
Everyday people at real stores charge different prices based on the status of consumers. It's no different on the internet except that a computer does it now. Everytime a company uses information about you to try and sell you more product on the internet people are up in arms but the day you're at Best Buy and they ask you for your area code it's no big deal.
At any rate, my guess is that the laws you were thinking about deal with bait&switch. If I advertise a product for $1.99 that is good for 1 week, when you come into the store to buy that product(in that week) I can't sell it to you for $10.57. There is a law agaist doing that. However, as long as Amazon doesn't advertise a special price for something to lure you to their site and then compute a -higher- price for you based on your customer status, they haven't broken that law. Again, I don't think amazon will make it a policy of rising prices. Even if they do, my faith is in the fact that a consumer will always be able too compare price A from Store 1 with price B and store 2 and decide what price is lower...maybe it's just me.
Yet more reason to get the best price information and that layer of anonymity provided by those comparative shopping engines:
Pricewatch
My Simon
CNet Shopper
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
No one has mentioned the possibility that consumers may on average benefit by better data collection and price discrimination. Game theoretic analysis shows this can actually happen. Check out this page if you know some game theory:
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/monopoly-memory.txt
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
example quote:
Who here hasn't already decided that Amazon really blows goats and stopped doing business with them months ago? I've felt that way about them almost from day 1.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Rothschild is in the Pale (don't ask why - it's a joke, OK?), and he goes into a store and asks how much an egg costs. "Ten rubles," says the storekeeper. "Ten rubles!" exclaims Rothschild. "Are eggs that scarce in these parts?" "No," responded the storekeeper, "but Rothschilds are."
I suspect this tactic will only be used to find out where to raise prices. If the goal is to sell the most items to consumers, then the optimal strategy is to set it at the lowest price across the board. NO, this experiment would see how much they could get away with charging. For it not to be, they would have to charge some people more to people who would pay more so they could sell it under cost to people who wouldn't. This is highly suspect since people who would pay more would probably buy more if the prices were lower. On the other extreme, they could offer a discount to people who buy more. That's reasonable. Is this experiment to determine that? I think not.
It's the opposite of the reason behind all those coupons you get with the weekend paper. Companies offer you a discount to try their product. Once you become a fan of that particular product, they have no incentive to offer further discounts, as long as you keep coming back. It's called discretionary pricing, and it's a great way for a company to improve their bottom line. With the amount of consumer-level information that's becoming available these days, I'm not surprised to see someone try this out.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I figured that it would only be a matter of time before someone really figures out the system and how to get the deepest discounts on everything, all the time.
Of course, that would be reverse-engineering their algorithm, which will probably be illegal soon.
This is a non-issue. If you agree to a price when you buy something, the only person you can blame later is yourself. So what if they are doing price testing? Shop around. Show them you won't pay the higher price.
This is pure cultural chauvinism -- "That's they way they do it from the time and place I'm from, so it must be RIGHT!"
Do you think that, in the kind of markets that existed for most of humanity's existence, and which still exist in most of the world, the seller doesn't try to charge a guy who looks rich more than a guy who looks poor?
Just because in a handful of cultures for about 100 years there have been one-price stores does NOT make that kind of pricing the "right way" to do things.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The basic difference is that in a regular shop, the same price is advertised to all. You know that they aren't preying on your buying habits. If you send your brother to get something, he'll be charged the same as you would have been. At a .com, it's like the shopkeeper takes a look at what kind of credit card you have and charges you more if it's a platinum. Which Amazon can do, 'cos they've seen your credit card.
Of course the way to get them on this is to search for a whole bunch of interrelated items and then not buy any of them. Then see what happens to the prices.
There have to be hundreds of ways to abuse this system. Any other ideas?
It appears that someone at amazon.com reads /. Now when i go to click on the planet of the apes full DVD collection, in IE5.5, i get "Broweser Bug"... Same with mozilla...
Mark Duell
Be a 'good customer' at amazon, get them to lower their prices for you, and then sell your cookies. What is fun is that you can sell the same cookie many times. The only problem is that cookies will probably spoil with use. You can also have special DVD flavored cookies, computer-book-flavoured cookies, etc.
Lets see amazon try to claim that their cookies are not yours to sell.
Get them now! Get them while they last! Fresh cookies from Amazon.com!
Perfectly discriminatory pricing takes the economy closer to the prerequisites for Coase's theorem to apply.
While perfect competition is good because it moves the surplus to the consumer, perfectly discriminatory pricing at least allows the surplus to exist.
In other words, while this may appear to hurt the customer, it helps the economy as a whole. So it's a good thing, since anything Amazon makes eventually trickles back to the consumers (even more so today than before, since more people directly hold stocks).
We're moving to a world where everyone gets the shaft on every purchase, but they're all so wealthy it doesn't matter.
--Kevin
Think about it...
You are at the Bar, it is $2.00 Draft night, and 10 beers later you have spent 50 bucks!
And you thought you just tipped well? No way buddy, as soon as ya get a litle tanked, the Barkeep is charging ya full price...
Trust me, I have worked at that bar...
What Amazon is doing is no different. They are taking advantage of the confused (although not neccessarily drunk) consumer, and fixing their prices accordingly.
AMZN - $48.90 by Xmas!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Totally off-topic, but...I've never heard the expression "chew them down" for bargaining. Is it possible this is a cleaned-up "Jew them down" (possibly without the knowledge of the original poster, who I don't want to accuse of nastiness)?
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
C'mon guys, why is it that you apparently think Amazon isn't entitled to d othe same things any other retailer does - go to Wal-Mart and see how prices fluctuate - all those "roll-back" signs show the ones that dropped (at least temporarily, but there's no notation (surprise, surprise) on the ones that went up a little bit.
This is completely normal practice in the brick and mortar retail business, whay bash Amazon for it? To me, this just shows the juvenile nature of the Slashdot crowd, who apparently just can't stand the fact that Bezos was sharp enough to patent one-click shopping before anyone else. (I'm on the record here as saying I think the patent is (and should be) valid, and the complaints are mostly sour grapes, or the rantings of those that think (wrongly) that patents are a bad thing. See my letters to LWN a few moths back for more info.)
And yes, I have noticed Amazon does this - I bought one the the slick little Linksys broadband routers from them last week, and noticed that delaying my purchase by three days cost me an extra couple of bucks - strange, but hardly anything to worry about, as it's still about the best price out there, and I really *like* one-click shopping - it's one of the reasons I still use and will continue to buy from Amazon. (Also, compare the effort of *cancelling* an order with Amazon to the effort required by other e-tailers for a real eye-opener.) My only complaint with them is that it's too hard to get in touch with a real person if something (usually shipping) goes wrong...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
We've all heard the anectote of Star Market raising the price of beer when they discount the diapers. (Assuming men who come in just for diapers on thier way home will buy beer too, or so says thier "Advantage Card").
There is nothing wrong with price adjustment for any reason, but charging three prices at once, and getting assigned a "price group" is wrong.
The difference is that your penny-pinching cards are not secretive and you know exactly what you're going into. The secrecy of this situation is what really stinks, a careful consumer has to assume that by not advertising the discount they don't have to advertise the premium and eventually Amazon charges whatever Amazon feels it can without upsetting the herd. This has nothing to do with a little card that says "After 10 subs get one free!"
This is old news. They've been testing random price drops for over a year now. They simply test to see at what price sells the best. From there they can maximize volume to profit levels.
They've done it with books, VHS movies, and now DVD's. It's not a big deal.
Aren't there intelligent vending machines in some places that bump up the price of cold drinks on hot days, and when they're selling a lot?
===
I would imagine, that your average scag head is especially unhappy when prices go up. S/he'd be used to getting her 5$ bag, I'd say a dealers much more likly to stiff on quantity or quality than price, and then who's going to be the biggest sucker, the new kid who's "trying it out", or the old mess-head thats done more dope than Cypress Hill? - No your analogy is poor.
Amazon (et al) on the other hand are in a much better possition to shuffle prices as the see fit. If someone shops there regular it would not be hard to write a learning algorythm (GA, NN, whatever) that fiddles the prices on the "recomended reading" list to maxamises its profit.
I could do it in a weekend ... and, Amazon, if your listening, for, say - ten grand, UKP, I will. :)
Thad
Thad
One-price stores are obviously the norm today for US bookstores. But you seem to imply that Amazon's pricing practice has historical precedent. This implication is completely incorrect.
In most parts of the world, a seller will try to charge the rich guy more. The difference is that the buyer can haggle. If I'm dealing with a Chinese merchant and I don't like the price, I can try to bargain. Amazon is different: I can't converse with a web site.
Never before in history has a merchant been able to charge different prices to different people, based on secret (unpublished) criteria, with no opportunity for the buyer to negotiate a better price.
If you aren't happy with Amazon behaving this way, you'll really be peeved with the kind of things that Credit Card companies do.
I don't really mind, myself.
So quite whining.
*Click* **BANG!!!**
*Click* **BANG!!!**
Wonder how many feet Amazon has? (I'm one of the lil piggies that will never shop there again).
Sig it.
Prescience: this is exactly what Jakob Nielsen warned vendors against back in March: see the appropriate Alertbox.
"There's the TV. It's all right there.
Commercials. We are not productive
anymore, they don't need us to make
things anymore, it's all automated. What
are we for then? We're consumers. Okay,
buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen.
But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, you
know what? You're mentally ill! That's
a fact! If you don't buy things...toilet
paper, new cars, computerized blenders,
electrically operated sexual devices...
SCREWDRIVERS WITH MINIATURE BUILT-IN
RADAR DEVICES, STEREO SYSTEMS WITH
BRAIN IMPLANTED HEADPHONES, VOICE-
ACTIVATED COMPUTERS, AND..." - Jeffery
"Advertisements have them chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs they hate
so they can buy shit they don't need.
We are the middle children of
history, with no purpose or place.
We have no great war, or great
depression. The great war is a
spiritual war. The great depression
is our lives. We were raised by
television to believe that we'd be
millionaires and movie gods and rock
stars -- but we won't. And we're
learning that fact. And we're very,
very pissed-off." - Tyler
How evil.
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Yes, you are correct on my misuse of "price fixing", however I still have a point. I not too long ago work for an auto parts store that had different prices (for research) in our store and the one about 10 minutes away. However, its would be illegal for us to jack the price of a starter 10 bucks if we say a customer walk in with a broken one, and less to they guy who is shopping around because his starter is getting "weak". In other words, we would know that this customer with the immobile car most likely would pay the extra money, in fact not even notice it, since he needs the starter, thus maximizing our profits "per customer".
Airlines do exactly the same thing. You could be paying twice as much or half as much as the person sitting next to you...
This is done all the time with big ticket items (cars, boats, homes). Ever checked your credit report? Ever wonder why your friend gets a lot more calls from credit card companies then you do? (Obviously I don't know you I'm just making an example) My brother who makes a lot more than me get's about 10 gold card apps in the mail a week. This is all based on his buying habits. The BMW dealership dropped a 530 in his lap and let him take it home for the night after checking his credit (No "leaving the drivers license" just let him take it to "see how it felt").
My point is this happens in meatspace as well.
How did you do that? I looked briefly but didn't see a way to do so after just a minute of looking.
What if a brick and mortor shop had one price up in it's window and charged another price inside?
A few Years Ago Coca-Cola was fined a few million for charging different prices from different customers in the EU. (The prices were based on wether or not the customer/retailer also sold concurrence products). In the EU you can only charge different prices, if the reason is transparent and legal. Normally this would be the usual '3 for 2' type of pricing. If Amazon do this with European customers, they might actually be sued.
That said:
13 But he replied to one of them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14 Take what belongs to you, and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? [the whole thing]
If you don't like the (randomly set) price Amazon's charging, don't pay it. But agreeing to pay it and then complaining that someone else got the same thing for less is ridiculous.
-----
Online store 'X' then decides to raise the price (for Joe ONLY) $0.50 to $1.00 on those items that Joe buys regularly. Joe, seeing a mild price increase continues his buying habits, maybe mumbling about inflation.
For 80-90% of the stupid consumers out there, would they really notice that they were paying a little more than everyone else? Meanwhile store 'X' has just increased revenue from one customer by $3.00 to $6.00 a month. Multiply that by thousands of idiot consumers and many who may buy MORE than Joe on a regular basis and you have a significant amount of money.
Think this doesn't appeal to greedy corporations selling things electronically? Guess again.
Shameless Plug! If you like trance, tell me what you think!!
The bottom line is Amazon is not a monopoly, they have plenty of competition.
So they can charge any damn price they want, reasonable or not. If you don't like it, you can do two things with sound moral ground beneath your feet:
1) Stop doing business with them. (I have, long ago.)
2) Discuss it publicly to show your displeasure to Amazon, and to warn other consumers about the behavior.
Amazon is being assholes again. Is anybody surprised?
Stop doing business with them. Try buy.com or FatBrain.
Or even Barnes and Noble, unless they've screwed you too.
-
I am replying as an AC because of my work. The reason I am guessing because they want to make themselves look better in Comparision shopping sites. When I was looking at HTTP client sources most had the Netscape strings. But most crawlers hide themselves as Netscape. Is this not odd??? Well Amazon caught on and has decided make themselves look better. Is this a problem? For the comparison shopping sites yes, because it leads to inaccurate results. For the Netscape browsers? No not really actually they should take advantage of it. If you think this is conspiracy talk, think again. After having dynamically queried many sites there are many "incorrect" implementations of HTTP, sites use to stop comparison shopping.
This is one hell of a braindead pricing policy. Maybe that is the only way Amazon can be profitable is to establish themselves as the cheapest until people stop shopping around and then randomly overcharge people by random small amounts... It seems pretty ridiculous to me...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Imagine the scene - a board room, the tension rises, everyone knows the numbers are looking bad, and suddenly a marketing exec speaks up : "Differential pricing ! It's the solution ! We can do what the (fill in industry as already mentioned in other posts) do ! Charge different people different amounts !".
The room goes quiet. One group thinks it is the perfect way to milk their more affluent customers and get some profit going for a change; others think "wow ! we can really beat the comparison shopping engines with this !". Another gang reckons it's a great way to snare new customers and then gradually raise prices on their subsequent visits....
Guess what ? It won't work. I don't believe that this can work in a way that won't repel as many people as it attracts, and those who have been repelled will never come back. It's too hard. How can some software know that CmdTaco's price threshold for an anime DVD is $20 ? That he'll go elsewhere the moment he realizes he is being screwed ?
OF course, I bet it looks real sweet in the briefings to the wall street crowd - "Amazon pioneers differential pricing model on the internet; applies for patent to protect their IP in this area..."..
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
Ferenghis have taken over Amazon.com.
They did the same thing with MP3 players three months ago.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Maybe it's a bit cynical, but perhaps they're using this to encourage people to store their information with them? I mean, with the recent change in the privacy policy, think about the implications:
They could be rewarding customers who are keeping cookies on their computers, they could be rewarding the very customers they have information to be sold on.
As mentioned by others it's something that could be considered price discrimination, but if it doesn't fall under that categorization, it could be something more dangerous as a precedent perhaps?
yours,
yours,
kbs
Noting on one hand that Price Discrimination can't occur with perfect competition, but on the other hand that the Web is the most perfect vehicle developed to date to exploit comsumers, Amazon could selectively offer prices based on :
- Region - "Let's charge those dumb Canadians more than the Americans!"
- Group - This is probably the most scary one, since they could segregate the customer based into arbitrary groupings, and charge each the most they would pay, thus maximising revenue
- Time - Charge different amounts based on time of day or night. Is there less price resistance amoung drunks? Amazon could find out pretty easily, noting that most people browing the web at 3AM Saturday morning probably have been drinking.
- Form - Most retailers already do this, but this could be used in combination with the above list entries.
My best guess of what is going on is Amazon is trying to get some empirical data about demand elasticity, and more importantly how changes in price impact demand amoung various groups of people.A message from our sponsor
If anyone besides Amazon (the largest online reseller of just about evertyhing) tried this, (i.e. Auto dealership, dept store, etc.) they would probably be sued, what makes Amazon so exempt from taking such blantant advantage of their customers?
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Right now, I bet they are keeping track of customers that are buying their products irregardless of the price (the price is marked up way higher than other stores). Now that they realize that the customer doesn't care too much about the price As Long As It's Amazon, it systematically marks up every product that customer sees with another $10-20 bucks. Quick easy cash eh?
Isn't this a little like that telephone company called "I don't care" that charges outrageous monthly rates?
Anyone else think this is funny? It must be hard for you to enjoy a sit down with that $5 late with all those cards in your wallet. Such a savvy consumer deserve to have his ass pained.
"But honey it was 50% off at Macy's!", a sentence every husband dreads.
The whole concept of revenue maximizing is dishonest and repulsive in retail. Good costs X, mark it up a percentage and sell it. Trying to squeeze every penny out of every person is just a waste of time. Greed drives inflation.
I don't buy from dishonest people.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I bought one of those Microsoft Optical Mice for $37.99. After using it for a couple of days, I decided I really liked it and ordered one for home. Price: $41.74
A couple of people at work liked it too and orders one. One got it for $39.18 and the other for $42.23 when they ordered it on the same day less than an hour apart.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Yea I tend to agree with the 'so what' crowd. Here are a couple of factors that play in my mind:
1. Brick and motor places have praticed this for many years. The best example I can think of is Las Vegas Hotels. Not only do they alter the prices from day to day based on availabity they also adjust the prices for when you stay, how long you stay, and on top of all that they may even adjust the prices per individual. If you don't believe me go to www.treasureisland.com get an online quote and then call to get the same quote. I promise they will be different. Also play around with adjusting the day, in a recent purchase I made for a hotel, adjusting the arrival date one day changed the price of the room almost $1000. No joke, you can try this at www.treasureisland.com now. Pick Sepetember 16 ($1200) as arrival first, then Septemeber 17 ($376) for a 5 day stay. Prices are slightly different.
2. I practice my right to choose my vendor. I check prices, look around for deals, and would notice if the price was jacked for me. I feel, let them jack the price for people who don't care (impluse purchase anyone?) and pass the saving on to me!
Summary: I and hopefully all consumers are educated enough to know that all vendors will try to sell something at the highest price that they can get. (Shop around and save money) or (Save time and waste money). Adjust for your situation and taste, salt to perfection and serve.
AMZN is not the only one doing this. Personally, I do not have a problem with it -- done in the bricks and mortar world more than most people realize. However, I am interested in the tech. NetPerceptions is arguably the market leader with their GroupLens technology. ZDNet has a good explanation/review of this technology and here is an ABCNews video (realvideo) reporting the technology. Essentially the application learns your likes/dislikes of products/services (my profile) so that products/services based on these likes/dislikes are recommended to you. Moreover, and this is the part I find fascinating, information is pulled from demographic data/others who have similar likes/dislikes of the same products/services I purchase and very different products/services are recommended. For instance, maybe The Godfather is my favorite movie and, therefore, there is a 90% likelihood that I would like cigars. The site would actively present the sale of cigars to me.
AMZN actively pricing its product based on a specific user and his/her profile is part of this technology --- your profile also dictates prices (higher or lower). Incidentially, other companies with such technology/recommendation engines include: BroadVision, Art Technology Group (ATG), Vignette...
New feature added to Amazon.com!
It used to be you had to got to different websites to compare prices on your favorite pR0n. Now you can do your comparison shopping without ever leaving Amazon.com. First check the price while logged in with your user account. If you don't like those prices, log out to check the anonymous user prices. If you don't like those prices, log in as a new user and browse around in the religous section for a while and watch all the pR0n prices drop.
Quack