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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.
"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.
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
'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.
For each person, they're displaying a price at which they'll sell to that person.
What part of this is "false"?
Do you also consider frequent-buyer discounts, loyalty programs, and targeted electronic coupons to be "false advertising"?
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?
Yeah, this is one I've never really understood. I used to think that you had to use the intermediary sites since when I was younger, my parents either always used agents or third party sites once we got Internet access.
But when someone pointed me to http://matrix.itasoftware.com/, which just lists flights and prices instead of actually letting you buy, I never went back to the annoying third party sites. I've never really gotten a deal on the third party sites that was any cheaper than just looking up the cost on the informational site and buying the itinerary straight from the airline, nor have the hotel deals been any cheaper or different for me than just booking the hotel independently. I know that my folks like it because it's all of the prep-work done from one site, which is a fair point, but I personally just haven't seen the benefit.
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.
Because they aren't changing the price based on skin color, disability, or any of the other protected classes. They are doing it to non-protected classes of people, which is which swell and dandy -- according to the law.
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.
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.
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".
Ok... fair enough, but why?
Why should it be criminal? You use your knowledge of the marketplace to get the best deal you can. In your example, the business is using its knowledge of the marketplace to get the best deal it can.
If you're suggesting that a business must sell at the same price to everyone, well, that has its own issues. Sounds simple, until you get into all the "what ifs".
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.
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?