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.
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"?
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.
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".
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.