Slashdot Mirror
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.
Supposedly you log in and put the item in your shopping cart and leave the site. Within a couple of days the merchant contacts you with a better price for those items.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
My company does this. If you put your items in the shopping cart and then leave them without buying, we have three email "triggers" that remind you those items are there. The first email just reminds you, the second offers a % discount, and the third offers a % discount + free shipping.
Presumably, you have to have a registered account with working email address.
The article talks about this. They say use a private window, and thereby no cookies, to see what a generic visitor would see, then also look in you regular browser window, and compare the two. Sometimes your cookies may help you get a lower price, in which case use them, and sometimes they may hurt, in which case use the private window that isn't sharing them.