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How To Beat Online Price Discrimination
New submitter Intrepid imaginaut sends word of a study (PDF) into how e-commerce sites show online shoppers different prices depending on how they found an item and what the sites know about the customer.
"For instance, the study found, users logged in to Cheaptickets and Orbitz saw lower hotel prices than shoppers who were not registered with the sites. Home Depot shoppers on mobile devices saw higher prices than users browsing on desktops. Some searchers on Expedia and Hotels.com consistently received higher-priced options, a result of randomized testing by the websites. Shoppers at Sears, Walmart, Priceline, and others received results in a different order than control groups, a tactic known as “steering.”
To get a better price, the article advises deleting cookies before shopping, using your browser's private mode, putting the items in your shopping cart without buying them right away, and using tools like Camelcamelcamel to keep an eye out for price drops.
I was trying to shop for resorts on my Linux box here and I got a popup stating, "There's nothing here you can afford.Try Six Flags during the work week."
True story.
As a frequent flyer, I too could benefit from defeating their price tricks, but really before I draw any conclusions of my own I'm wondering do we have any word from Bennett Haselton. Any insight of his would be appreciated on this topic. He's a frequent contributor.
The flight search middlemen have to take their cut, after all. I got my plane tickets for 75% off this way.
"For instance, the study found, users logged in to Cheaptickets and Orbitz saw lower hotel prices"
"To get a better price, the article advises deleting cookies before shopping"
Ummm, what?
Sales I don't mind. Sometimes you have to move old inventory. But coupons are just a PITA that only exist to give housewives/househusbands something to do with their time. So online shopping with all its contortions and the web20-ification of advertising just drives me completely up the damn wall. The minute I open a browser to buy something I can feel my stress levels rising and if I'm lucky I'll finish buying it before all the cussing and ranting force me to close the tab before I damage my PC.
Someone had to do it.
Could someone clarify this for me "putting the items in your shopping cart without buying them right away", how will this make the item cheaper? When i put something in my cart i already know how much it is.
Displaying one price to a person while displaying a different price for a second person is what I would classify as false advertising.
Especially if they're in the same area, shopping the same store. Being logged in or not should have zero effect on the price.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
'steering' exists in meatspace, and most consumers actively embrace it. Take the average supermarket. High value items are placed at the edges of the aisles so you'll see them first. floor tiles are set in different sized to influence your cadence and ultimately how long you spend in a particular section. the 'landing zone' of a supermarket features specially illuminated produce first, typically directly in the path of locomotion. loyaty cards belch coupons for related goods and services the grocery store wishes to 'move' that may be of a lower or higher price point. milk in the front of the store costs more than milk in the back, and its tagged and tracked through the payment system differently. Baskets are commonly difficult to find and carts have since 1970 increased 60% in size in order to induce the shopper to buy more.
bars and resaraunts do this as well. by pricing well drinks closer or identically to call drinks, the bar discourages patrons with less income. happy hour is cheaper than saturday night, and cheaper still than valentines evening.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This has been going on for a very long time, but those who have used Skyscanner (and found prices rise the more searches they run from their IP address) will know that deleting cookies alone isn't anywhere near enough. I have tested this myself years ago and had different prices for the same long haul flight on my PC using home router vs. mobile phone using cellular data. Rather than booking the flight over cellular data I waited a few days and the price on my PC returned to normal. Does anyone have any other ways (elaborate or otherwise) around this problem? Why is it fair that the IT illiterate have to pay a premium for goods?
we (wife/I) own three vehicles: an 08 Odyssey (kids), an 07 ES350 (her primary) & a 13 IS350C (my primary).
if we go to a restaurant in my convertible instead of van & matre dei recommends the surf & turf special that's fine, if they add $20 to the "market price" b/c the valet tipped them off (& gets $5 kickback) that should be criminal! TFA sounds a lot more like the later...
how is this differant than a physical store charging differant prices based on physical trates like skin color or gender? They are discriminating against people who arent savvy enough to game the system...seems shadey at best and pretty illegal to be honest.
Markets keep getting more and more efficient, and that means there are fewer and fewer "tricks," by which I mean consistently getting a better price without working at it.
None of which is to say you "ought" to work for lower prices - how much is your time worth? You could almost always save another dime by waiting and looking more. Just check a few different products at a few different sites, and you will do OK. Don't settle into a rut, like "oh I have Amazon Prime so I just get everything from them," unless the convenience is worth getting milked.
Instead, how about we just fix the problem outright....
Setup 3 computers.
1 with a white guy
1 with a black guy
1 with a woman
make sure the appropriate people are logged in, not logged in, have cookies, etc...
Show the price differences.
Snap a picture, smiling white guy, sad black guy and woman...
Post it to twitter and let the general public make their usual incorrect inference.
Watch the hilarity ensue and the entire idea of variable pricing die in fire.
This looks like the electronic equivalent of haggling in a shop [bazaar]. Contrast this with the [anglo] best-price, take-it-or-leave it across multiple competitors. As a consumer, I vastly prefer the latter. As a seller I might prefer haggling (tied customers), but only if I have power when I buy (often I'm as tied).
A consumer negotiating with a seller is a grand delusion. The seller knows far more about their costs and market demand than you ever can. They spend their careers at it. All you can do is walk away, hopefully there are competitors. IMHO, this is the great different between First- and Third-World economies -- competition in the former, and very-restricted (cronyism) in the latter.
So I stay away from anything that looks like haggling (even MiR). That is my only choice.
An example of this price-adjusting practice is when we needed to order an advertising banner for my wife's business. I did a little Google searching and found halfpricebanners.com had what we wanted at a good price so we used them. A couple months latter we needed another banner so I went to their website and was surprised by the price it quoted for exactly the same kind of banner - about double as before. Being the Internet nerd I am, I surmised something was going on so I went back to Google and did the same kind of search I had done before which again produced their link. Sure enough, if I go to their site from Google (not just from their ad, even the organic listing) then their prices are half of what is offered to people who go straight to their website. From then on we always used Google first to get the "Google discount".
At a HD I asked for something that I couldn't find and the employee said it was online only. I checked it with my phone and compared to Amazon. Right there in their store I ordered if from Amazon due to lower price. If HD is charging mobile users more, I suspect I'm not the only shopper who takes a few seconds to compare elsewhere.
The price difference may be due to supply and demand. I've noticed several times that right after buying something online, the price will change within the same day. Example; bought some items at amazon and the price dropped a couple bucks right after the purchase was made and before it was shipped. This has happened several times, and the price change for the same item was across all suppliers at amazon.
How difficult would it be for a firefox plugin to alter HTML headers like HTTP_USER_AGENT & HTTP_REFERER to convince the sales site that you are a poor student ? The on-line sites will howl - but if it is OK for them to profile to charge me more, then I believe that it is OK for me to game them.
How long until someone offers a service that explores multiple paths to a particular item (mobile, customer, non-customer, cleared cookies, items-in-cart, etc.) at a particular retailer and provides the best price?
A few months ago there were reports of how the website from the French rail company was increasing the price of the ticket in your basket to make you feel you had to buy before it would increase even more.
mode, putting the items in your shopping cart without buying them right away, and using tools like Camelcamelcamel to keep an eye out for pric webdesigne www.yoginetindia.com
you have to buy a car web site
But when
http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/ could do that. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If that 6 cents were no biggie, then why does Aldi make you pay it? If that quarter for the buggies were no biggie then why do they make you pay it? Is it going to be a biggie when they start making you pay for a cashier instead of using a self checkout? I bet you didn't think your friendly Aldi tip was going to turn in to such a biggie huh? :)
You're right about the price being about the same but what you failed to remember is that I'll get it in 2 days. When you go with a non-Prime vendor, you might get it in 2 days, but it'll probably be 3 or 4 depending on the USPS. What I've noticed quite often is a shipping charge (even free) usually means it's coming from China so you're going to wait much longer. I've even bought an item that was Prime and had it replaced with a shipped from China version which I promptly called Amazon about and made them refund me the purchase. Even if you and timeOday believe I'm getting milked, I can still get a 24pack of toilet paper cheaper on Prime than going to Walmart, so that is one hell of a milking I'm getting, lol.
Now about bastards who fuck: The following statement is a hypothesis and only an hypothesis based on semi-solid rectal science. The author does not believe he is better than a bastard. Reader discretion is advised!
Being called a bastard is supposed to be an insult spouted off by those who think they are more righteous and better than you. One typically insults a lesser person to make themselves feel better but most importantly to remind said lesser that they are scum, will always be scum, and should wallow in their misery. So the premise is that a bastard should be unhappy. You know what makes me happy? Fucking. So you see, two bastards fucking are probably enjoying themselves and we just can't have that can we? Better to remind them that their mother's were whores and they need to get back to the self loathing as soon as possible.
Counter-predatory-pricing botnets: It's only a matter of time.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
How does Camelcamelcamale avoid itself being fooled by the same tactics described here?