If you use a Mac or Android, e-commerce sites may be charging you more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/if-you-use-a-mac-or-an-android-e-commerce-sites-may-be-charging-you-more/?tid=rssfeed

by altern8 • 12 years ago

133 91 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

click170• 12 years ago

There are browser extensions to automatically compare prices for you already, is there something insufficient about those extensions or is it just that they aren't widely known and used?

murphm8• 12 years ago

Do you have a recommendation for which extension or extensions to use?

hsshah• 12 years ago

This is mentioned by someone else on the top as well. I love camelcamelcamel and it's chrome browser extension. You can limit it to be able to run only when you are on amazon domain.

newscracker2• 12 years ago

Apart from camelcamelcamel, there's also Invisible Hand [1] for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that provides price comparison and updates. I doubt if it can avoid browser sniffing or fingerprinting though. Also, it works only in the U.S., the UK and Germany and it makes money from commissions paid by some retailers.

Any kind of comparison is better than no comparison at all. :)

[1] http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/

altern83• 12 years ago

I would say not widely known/used... I didn't know they changed prices like that :-/

eloisant• 12 years ago

Apparently these browser extensions should spoof various user agents, I'm not sure they do that.

They're mostly about comparing prices from different sites.

etep• 12 years ago

So basically e-commerce sites are charging me more?

justcommenting2• 12 years ago

these practices are converging on something like a 21st century version of redlining, and i hope consumer advocates will work to expose and address these modern forms of opaque price discrimination.

some may claim that these practices can benefit consumers, but unless it's done transparently in ways that consumers know and understand, it primarily serves to increase information asymmetry.

altern83• 12 years ago

The only excuse they could give if they're exposed is that they're doing A/B testing with pricing (at least that's what I'd say), but it would be pretty bad.

cpeterso• 12 years ago

Time to remove OS information leakage from user agent string? Sites could still profile users by browser (e.g. Safari), though.

justcommenting2• 12 years ago

I would encourage people to

1) collect data and submit written complaints to regulators like the FTC if they believe they've identified unfair or deceptive business practices

2) boycott companies that engage in these practices, and ask your friends to do the same

3) consider technical mitigations like the de-identifying properties that using the Tor Browser Bundle offers

ryan-c• 12 years ago

It's not difficult to get figure out what operating system you're on without looking at the user agent string.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, the business logic underlying much of this personalization remains a mystery.

Price discrimination appears, at first glance, to be about maximising profit, but really it's about clearing the market.

Say you're a cinema, and you set your list price for a ticket at £10. 20 adults show up and buy the tickets and are happy. Then 10 students show up, scoff, and go home - they weren't willing to go above £7. The market has not cleared: you'd be happier with £70 from them than the nothing you've got, and the students would be happier being £70 worse off but having seen the film. Neither party got what they wanted, no trade occurred, and no economic value was created.

The situation could be improved so that everybody gets what they want without harming anybody else: set a student rate at £7. Students get to see the films and your cinema makes more money - everyone is as happy as they could be.

In this example, the criteria for price discrimination is discovered by intuition, existing knowledge of students, maybe surveys. But even this isn't ideal - what about that one really tight student who buys pasta in 20kg bags and who values a trip to the cinema at £4? Ideally you want their £4 and they want to see the film - but how to cater for them without shooting yourself in the foot by making the student price £4 across the board?

Until the advent of the internet and fancy algorithms that could at least try to understand you, you couldn't. But today maybe we can.

Everyone has their own "true" valuation for a given product (not how much they think it should be worth, but how much they're willing to pay), and if you're a supplier with a magic ball which can divine this with 100% accuracy then you're as well selling your product at 1p over cost if that's your customer's true valuation. Again: they get the product they wanted and you get profit you couldn't have had any other way, and everyone's as happy as they can be.

But we don't have magic balls, and you can't ask someone for their true valuation because suddenly you'll find yourself knee-deep in a bartering game of bullshit and lies. Your only option is to try to divine it somehow.

This is what these guys are doing. And it's a good thing. To say "this is wrong and it should stop" is incredibly selfish - with reference to the example above, an equivalent statement might be "Yes I'll pay £10 to see this movie, but only if those students don't get a discount, which I implicitly understand to mean robbing you, dear cinema owner, of £70, and those students of the chance to see this hot new flick, even though both of those things are fuck all to do with me."

If you're a habitual bargain hunter (not out of necessity, more as a personality trait) and you're feeling affronted by this then all you need do is take a cue from these companies and adjust your tactics to suit the 21st century. Googling around may have done you proud up til now, but the world has moved on. I daresay that once you've mastered the art of using a VPN, user agent spoofing, and possibly the cultivation of a set of dishonest consumer profiles, you may find you'll save even more money in the face of this new enemy.

rosser• 12 years ago

Student pricing at the cinema is disanalogous to the way price discrimination is done on the internet. In the former case, the fact that students (and children and seniors and, and, and) pay a different price than others is clearly disclosed to everyone. Online, it's not.

altern83• 12 years ago

...and it makes sense. Also, IMHO the thing isn't about people with PCs paying less, but people using Macs getting charged more.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

The only way transparency affects the optimality of a price discriminating system is possibly by screwing the whole thing up by creating resentment. This doesn't happen so much for cinema tickets as children/students/OAPs are more (almost universal) stages of life that we can all relate to as opposed to groups based on some trait.

No matter how pissed off people get about finding out that they paid more than someone else, it has absolutely no bearing on the mathematics which shows this to be the optimal (for both producers and consumers) way to allocate scarce resources.

wodenokoto• 12 years ago

Actually it is not. Many places have student discount but don't advertise it. You have to ask.

Thrymr• 12 years ago

It is a real difference when you see that there is a student price posted at the box office, but you can also see that the regular price will apply to you, so you pay that.

In an opaque market in which everyone pays a different price, but no one knows what anyone else is paying, the consumer is at a disadvantage. There have always been coupons, special deals, and so on, but having every transaction getting prices separately and privately is something new, and consumers aren't going to like it, for two reasons: they hate the idea that other people are getting a better deal, and the information asymmetry means that they are almost certainly actually going to pay more on average.

talmand• 12 years ago

Those sales tactics are not new, but they may be new to some markets. The tactics have been in play by salesmen in multiple markets for generations. For example, car sales operate much this way in most cases. Which is probably why car salesmen have such bad reputations among buyers.

Larrikin• 12 years ago

This only works if you only plan on buying one thing. I may value the $10 ticket at an even higher $12 dollars so I'm willing to pay that and the algorithm changes the price to reflect that, but now I'm out of the $2 I was planning spending on popcorn and can't make that purchase. The non-transparent price discrimination makes it impossible to plan future purchases.

berberous• 12 years ago

My issue with such opaque pricing methods is that there are substantial economic externalities. If you charge students a different rate, no big deal. You are either a student or you are not a student. But once you get into more complex price discrimination, you force the user to expend time and effort to understand how the company is price discriminating, and to spend time trying to figure out how to counteract it.

For example, airline pricing is a clusterfuck of opaque pricing. I spend literally hours whenever I book a ticket, trying to figure out the optimal flight. Other flyers also spend similar amounts of time trying to figure out the pricing algorithms and not get screwed. Overall then, thousands upon thousands of man hours are wasted just trying to figure out how to get charged a decent price.

Frankly, I think such bullshit should be illegal. The airlines may earn a few extra bucks, but no one considers how much time and effort is wasted by the user.

cpach• 12 years ago

”no one considers how much time and effort is wasted by the user”

It depends on how you valuate your own time. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company would probably not spend hours for a gain that is so low compared to his salary.

ddlatham5• 12 years ago

Suppose the seller produces a good at a cost of $10, buyer A values the good at $13, and buyer B values the good at $16. That means that selling to both can add $9 worth of value. Who should capture that new $9 of value? How should it be divided?

If the price is $10 uniformly, then the seller gets no value from selling, A gets $3 of value, and B gets $6 of value.

If the price is $12 uniformly, the seller gets $4 of value, A gets $1 of value and B gets $4 of value.

If the price is $14 uniformly, A won't buy, the seller gets $4 of value, and B gets $2 of value.

If the seller can divine the true value to A and B and set the price to $12.99 for A and $15.99 for B, then the seller can capture essentially ALL of the value available in the exchange.

It definitely seems there are many cases where price discrimination creates more value. But who should capture that value? Sellers? Buyers? Shared somehow? How?

greenleafjacob• 12 years ago

You are using the term 'value' in a loaded sense. If you use the proper term "consumer surplus," your argument becomes very different. "Who should capture that consumer surplus? Sellers? Buyers? Shared somehow? How?"

In my own mind, it's kind of irrelevant who gets it, because I don't recognize that buyer B has a right to pay only $10 or $13 or any other amount. I think it follows that if you allow sellers to discriminate among any classes of buyers, then there is no way to draw the line at how permissibly narrow those classes can be drawn.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

They both do! Value != money.

You don't need to subtract a penny to make it so. The value of the product for A must be greater than $13 or A won't buy it. The value of $13 cash must be greater than the value of not selling the product to the consumer or the seller won't sell. Everybody has more value than what they started with!

The only way this can possibly be true for all cases is via per-consumer price discrimination, anything less will always leave someone out.

logfromblammo5• 12 years ago

The total possible benefit to trade is fixed, at the area between the supply and demand curves wherever demand exceeds supply. This area is maximized, giving the greatest possible benefit to the economy, by setting the price where the curves intersect.

Then the consumers take the area above that price, and the suppliers get the value below. These are not necessarily equal areas; they depend on the econometrics shaping the curves.

In your example, the market-clearing price is $13. The consumer benefit is $3 to a and $0 to B, and the supplier benefit is $6. But no single party knows in advance what the market-clearing price is.

The easiest way to find it is for all 3 to engage in a reverse Dutch auction. A writes down "buy 1 @ $16". B writes down "buy 1 @ $13". C writes down "sell 10 @ $10". The auctioneer looks at all the slips and announces that the price is $13 and that C is the first (and only) supplier. Everyone leaves happy.

harryh3• 12 years ago

You know those psychology games where there are two people and the first person is given $10 to split between the two of them. They can split $5/$5 or $1/$9 or even $.01/$9.99. Then the second person can either accept the split and take their share or nix the whole deal and no one gets anything.

Aggressive price discrimination reminds me of this game. If I'm willing to pay exactly £20 to see that movie and the movie theatre is charging £19.99 I should take that deal. Even if they're only charging you £9.99 (because your willingness to pay is only £10).

Taking that deal is the right thing to do. Right?

But it turns out in those experiments that if the split proposed is two uneven then the second person will say screw it. No one gets nothing! People have an innate sense of fairness.

The same thing applies to what's going on here. Something about charging people differently based on their User-Agent really rubs people the wrong way. It's a step too far so they just table flip and say screw it.

Is it rational in an homo economicus kind of way? Nope. Is the the way people actually behave. Yup.

pwnna• 12 years ago

I don't remember where I saw this, but I believe this has to do with culture. In North America what you described is true, where as in developing countries it is not. The second person would rather just take whatever money is given and run.

If someone can remind me of the name of this game I can find it..

ObviousScience2• 12 years ago

Is it rational in an homo economicus kind of way? Nope.

I disagree.

It's not rational if you view it as a single transaction ever, but at the moment you begin to think of the relationship as an iterated game of possible transactions, punishing the other party at a cost to yourself can change their future behavior and advantage you over the long run.

So what you're arguing doesn't make sense in a single transaction is actually a good strategy in the iterated environment that the market actually is.

Example: if there's a correlation between you turning down their offer and them making you a better offer in the future, turning down offers in an iterated version of the game you commented on becomes a viable strategy and even rational in some situations.

tonglil• 12 years ago

This type of thinking reminds me of the show Golden Balls: two parties get the same thing or no one gets anything at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

AnthonyMouse2• 12 years ago

Everyone has their own "true" valuation for a given product (not how much they think it should be worth, but how much they're willing to pay), and if you're a supplier with a magic ball which can divine this with 100% accuracy then you're as well selling your product at 1p over cost if that's your customer's true valuation. Again: they get the product they wanted and you get profit you couldn't have had any other way, and everyone's as happy as they can be.

This is where you're wrong. Not everyone is as happy as they could be. If there were no price discrimination then the theatre would make more money charging £7 to all 20 adults and 10 students (£210) than charging £10 to only the 20 adults (£200) and having ten empty seats. In consequence the adults are worse off to the tune of £3 than they would be in the absence of price discrimination.

The good that price discrimination is theoretically supposed to do is where e.g. it costs $10 to make a widget and most customers are willing to pay $50 but a small minority are only willing to pay $12. Obviously if the seller has to pick one price it will be $50 and the $12 customers are out of luck.

The problem with this is that it assumes either a monopolistic seller or explicit or implicit collusion between sellers. Because if the market has vigorous competition then engaging in price discrimination will only drive the customers being discriminated against to your competitors.

So if you think you've found a situation where price discrimination would be a good thing, what you've really found is a situation where antitrust enforcement would be a good thing.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

This is where you're wrong. Not everyone is as happy as they could be. If there were no price discrimination then the theatre would make more money charging £7 to all 20 adults and 10 students (£210) than charging £10 to only the 20 adults (£200) and having ten empty seats.

No, I'm not. For one thing, I picked £7 out of thin air. Change it to £6 and this (erroneous anyhow) statement falls apart. Moreover your analysis is wrong - not everyone is as happy as they could be, you're only thinking from the consumer's perspective. The cinema could have made £7 * 10 + £10 * 20 = £270 so in your "best" case for everyone, the cinema is actually £60 short of their best scenario. The 20 adults were willing to spend £10 each, so their arbitrary £3 bonus that they didn't actually demand is optimal based on what? Consumers being less evil than companies? Give me a break.

if the market has vigorous competition then engaging in price discrimination will only drive the customers being discriminated against to your competitors.

It is not discrimination in the political sense, but the dictionary sense: to differentiate. Price discrimination in theory should not drive customers anywhere but rather make them indifferent to their choice of supplier.

WildUtah• 12 years ago

"The problem with this is that it assumes either a monopolistic seller or explicit or implicit collusion between sellers. Because if the market has vigorous competition then engaging in price discrimination will only drive the customers being discriminated against to your competitors."

That's why gp used a movie theater as an example. The movie market depends on state authorized monopoly in the form of copyright. The result is that price discrimination is more legitimate and more beneficial to producers and consumers than it would be in a competitive market.

Of course, copyright exists as a trade off. The benefits of promoting the arts are worth it even though monopoly is bad, as long as the system is administered reasonably and competition exists between different producers of copyrighted works and each has a monopoly only on his own product.

The economics of a complex trade off like that are not a guide to how other open markets should work.

And even well intentioned state monopolies can be run badly and become a disaster. Just look at software patents.

satori99• 12 years ago

This is what these guys are doing. And it's a good thing. To say "this is wrong and it should stop" is incredibly selfish -

This is done en-masse to my entire country, Australia. We call it "The Australia Tax". And yeah, it pisses us off.

In some cases it has been cheaper to fly economy from Sydney to LA to purchase sofware, than the local price. Even for downloadable products. It's not an exchange rate thing, nor a local tax issue, and it's not the tyranny of distance either. It's more to do with the fact that we are perceived as a rich country.

Using VPNs and also mail forwarding services to get around some of the more outrageous markups is becoming more popular. Australia Post even launched their own US address forwarding service this week to get in on the action.

kefka• 12 years ago

With software goods, the best downward force with regards to price is piracy. We have seen this force in effect in the movies and music. Movies used to take two years to go from box office to rental. Now movies only take 6 weeks to go from big screen to DVD. The big change here is that piracy was the downward force. And it served as a great effect to bring materials to market quicker.

Admittedly piracy is illegal, but also very effective. Considering the small amount of bandwidth needed to pirate software, it would be negligabe to get at will.

The best plan, though, it is to use open source software. But in cases of market capture, one must use the de facto software.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

Yeah I get that. It's worth pointing out that I'm talking largely from an academic stance and what I'm saying doesn't really apply to shitty implementations. The theory is compelling and the reality is always different, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

So why are they "clearing the market" only on Android and Macs then? Shouldn't the same happen with other devices?

DanBC• 12 years ago

Those people paying £10 are not necessarily happy with it, especially if they realise they could have been paying less.

It is a terrible idea to have an "enter your coupon code" box during checkout for precisely that reason.

See also the monkey grape experiment.

gabemart• 12 years ago

Your analysis is extremely one-sided in favor of producers and against consumers.

In economics, the difference between the maximum a consumer is willing to pay for a certain good and the the actual price charged is called "consumer surplus". For example, if I buy an apple for $0.50 but the maximum I would have payed is $1.25, I enjoy $0.75 of consumer surplus.

Essentially what you are proposing is that consumer surplus should always optimally be zero. That in a perfect world, every producer would charge each consumer exactly their maximum willingness to pay for each good.

But just as there is consumer surplus, there is producer surplus. Producer surplus is the difference between the minimum price they would be willing to sell a good for and the actual price they sell that good for. So, as an apple producer, if the lowest price I could profitably sell an apple for is $0.10 but I actually sell if for $0.50, I enjoy $0.40 of consumer surplus.

In traditional free-market models, at an equilibrium price there is a mixture of consumer and producer surplus. Consumers buy things for a bit less than their maximum willingness to pay, and producers sell things for a bit more than their rock-bottom just-marginally-profitable price.

In your model of perfect price discrimination, there is a huge shift in surplus from consumers to producers. Yes, it's efficient in terms of allocation. But there's a huge loss in utility for consumers.

lorddoig9• 12 years ago

This is true for any case in isolation, but for all consumers in aggregate there is no other way to do things that ensures an increase in everyone's wealth.

Any kind of flattened pricing structure will always harm some consumers for the benefit of others in a sufficiently large market. If I'm willing to pay £12 for X, you're willing to pay £8, and the producer is asking for a flat £10 because people like me find price discrimination morally abhorrent, then: I get the utility from having X plus a bit more from the £2 kickback; the producer isn't fulfilling his goal of profit maximisation and has incurred an opportunity cost of my £2 + your £8 = £10; and you get nothing. I'm the only winner, and the £2's worth of economic value I've gained by enforcing an unfair pricing structure is less than the sum of the value I've deprived you and the producer of - my behaviour is tantamount to stealing a small slice of yours and the producers combined utility and burning the rest.

The only way around this is to find a way to set price equal to true valuation on an individual basis. Of course, if you allow your model to not be Pareto efficient ("there is no change that could be made to benefit someone without harming someone else") then there are much more efficient ways to steal wealth than flat pricing.

unprepare• 12 years ago

So is a student who is willing to pay 10$ doing the wrong thing when they use the student discount and pay only 7$?

If not, why is it wrong for a non-student to desire paying only 7$?

pwr222• 12 years ago

Misleading because it is about maximising profit. That is what leads to the cinema's attempt to clear the market. If they make no profit on the £4 student they don't care whether he sees his film or not.

Peoples valuation isn't going to be consistent either, nor is it going to exist in a vacuum. For instance, if the £7 students here that their stingy friend gets in for £4 then they may well see things differently.

dashboardfront• 12 years ago

Price discrimination clearly involves profit maximization, otherwise the firm would have no incentive to carry it out in the first place. The movie theatre is not practising price discrimination because it's dedicated to some noble goal of clearing the market.

As mentioned above, your method has essentially extracted all possible consumer surplus and shifted it over to the producer. I'm not sure why this is a good thing; every consumer is purchasing at the maximum price they would be willing to pay, which means they're actually getting the minimum amount of utility out of it, while the producer is getting a huge amount of utility (all that surplus).

Furthermore, you seem to be ignoring the fact that money can be spent on more than one product. No, I am not happy as I can be if I'm charged the maximum amount for each product I purchase because that limits my overall utility as I can't purchase as large of a consumption bundle.

Finally, in your example, you say no economic value was created because those students did not get to spend the 70 pounds on the movie theatres. You're implying that the money somehow goes to waste, which is not true. More likely, they'll go purchase a substitute good (dvd rentals, student plays) and increase GDP via consumption through that.

logfromblammo5• 12 years ago

Price discrimination is the means by which a producer captures the consumer benefit to trade.

Let's go back to Econ 101. Draw your price axis vertically, and your quantity axis horizontally. Make a big 'X' for supply and demand curves. Draw horizontal and vertical lines through the intersection point in the X to the axes.

You just found the market-clearing price and quantity.

There should be a triangle above that horizontal line and below the demand curve. That area represents the consumer benefit to trade. It's what people would have paid, but didn't have to. Below the line and above the supply curve is the producer benefit to trade. It's extra money people got above what they would have ordinarily accepted for their goods.

When a supplier has multiple price levels, it is trying to capture more of the total benefit of trade by grabbing rectangular chunks out of the consumers' area.

The fair thing to do is set one price for everybody, exactly at the market-clearing price. When you take the consumer benefit, they have less money in their pockets than they should, and that distorts the demand curve for every other good and service in the market. You are essentially waging war upon every other supplier, for the money of every consumer that does not participate in producing your specific good.

The cinema should price tickets such that they fill every seat in the viewing room by showtime. (Or actually, for information purposes, try for one empty seat.) If you price-discriminate, the people who paid the most for tickets might not be buying popcorn, or eating out at the restaurant across the street before the show, or grabbing ice cream afterward. The "fair" way to get more of their money is to try to sell them more goods and services than the cheapskates. Upsell them on first-class seating, or let them buy the right to request a 10-minute intermission so they can hit the bathrooms without missing any of the show, or give them organic popcorn with grass-fed butter instead of diacetyl-flavored soybean oil.

As both a consumer and a producer of other goods, I say it is bullshit, it is wrong, and it should stop. It is not quite as bad for me as it is for other people, because Amazon employs a lot of software professionals directly, but it is undeniably anti-competitive behavior. If every producer did it, people would buy less of everything, because as consumers, they would seldom see any benefit to trading. We would be wasting quite a lot of time haggling, and end up with fewer goods and services.

Your cinema argument comes from the perspective that the owner is somehow robbed by trading more. If the fixed price is 10, he earns 20. If it is 7, he earns 84. If it is 4, he earns 52. His supply curve is not flat. It is more stair-stepped, representing the fixed costs of opening an entire viewing room, the smaller variable costs of maintaining it for smaller or larger audiences, and stair steps for adding additional viewing rooms for a single show. He can calculate that supply curve based on costs and profit margins. Sussing out the demand curve on any given night takes some guesswork and price titration. Once you find the market-clearing price, you can drop all the discounts and coupons and market research and make that the one price for everyone, and occasionally wobble the price a bit to see if tastes have changed any.

That is not what Amazon is doing. They are segmenting the market, not trying to clear it.

harryjo2• 12 years ago

What is Amazon doing? You wrote a long sensible post, and then threw in an unexplained dig against Amazon.

userbinator• 12 years ago

I wonder if this works in the other direction too: pretend you're accessing their site from e.g. IE6 on Win98... or maybe a somewhat more recent but still extremely-outdated configuration that at least will work with their site.

Several years ago, for a brief period I used no user-agent header, which caused quite a few sites to show nothing more than an obscure "500 internal server error" message, which disappeared as soon as a UA header was added, even if it contained nothing more than random rubbish.

taspeotis• 12 years ago

Using a shitty browser can cost you more [1].

[1] http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

calbear81• 12 years ago

I can provide some insight into why the hotel prices are different (I run Room77, a hotel metasearch site). Generally, many hotels enforce a parity price display rule with their sellers (think Minimum Advertised Price) so the travel sites aren't supposed to market a rate below the market price. There are exceptions built in for "members only" clubs since these users are gated and allowed to get a non-public rate. There are also exceptions in some cases for mobile rate discounting since they are generally last minute and if you have the app installed you could technically be considered part of a "club".

bdkoepke• 12 years ago

I use http://camelcamelcamel.com for amazon price tracking. Does anyone know of any other websites like this with price tracking?

For instance, Artificial intelligence a modern approach is $135 right now, but using this site I can see that it was <$90 in January of this year and it hit $100 in September: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Ap...

Same story with Introduction to Algorithms, except it is now $80 and the lowest it hit was $44 in October: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Edition-T...

hrjet2• 12 years ago

But then, how would you be sure that web sites like camelcamelcamel.com are not price-steering you with false data?

cooper122• 12 years ago

While it's true that they might have the incentive to do this because of affiliate fees, they'd need access to the particular site's price-steering specifics, which I doubt they'd give out due to competitive reasons. (For Amazon itself, the OP article doesn't mention price-steering, and the incident from 2000 it linked [1] quotes CEO who promised to never do it again)

If they don't have access to that, they can't price-steer or else users would notice discrepancies between the listed price and the site's price and the main users of those sites are the price-minded.

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily2...

sireat• 12 years ago

Just another point of anecdata: Camelcamelcamel has been really good at getting me information when prices change, and it has been for some 4-5 years.

Ecio78• 12 years ago

I have used in the past pricenoia.com, it had similar features: Amazon price history, comparison between local Amazon sites and mail notification when price reaches some threshold. I've just checked, and it looks like it has been closed in September :( http://pricenoia.tumblr.com/post/96524879555/pricenoia-shuts...

josefresco• 12 years ago

"Does anyone know of any other websites like this with price tracking?"

PriceZombie?

pixelcort• 12 years ago

Here's an auction style that could be used to determine an optimal price, particularly for digital goods:

1. Each shopper specifies the max they're willing to pay for the item. Perhaps pre-auth this price on their credit card.

2. Merchant calculates - for every hypothetical price point - total revenue from all the shoppers who would we willing to pay at least that hypothetical price.

3. Whichever price causes the most revenue wins. All shoppers who are willing to pay at least this much are charged and receive the item.

trhway• 12 years ago

Cue in Digital Millenium Retail Act prohibiting circumvention of technical measures of personalization (like turning cookies off with intent to circumvent personalization)...

goforads• 12 years ago

It's worth reading the actual paper closely.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf

The authors didn't find any smoking gun. None. Zero.

They found some travel sites offering member discounts--no surprise there. They also found sellers were personalizing search rankings--no surprise again. And they found a persistent pricing differential for Home Depot, but were careful to note that it could be a server-side quirk.

egeozcan• 12 years ago

Doepfner said the resulting dramatic drop in traffic to his company's publications was proof of Google's overwhelming power in the search market. He said he hoped lawmakers, courts and competition regulators would take action to curb its powers.

No the dramatic drop was caused by you relying on a search engine's news section too much to build your online business and then simply ditching it with no alternative. If Google has overwhelming power in the search market, then Bild has overwhelming power in the newspaper market. Not being able to utilize that is your fault and it's pathetic (sorry for the strong word) to call lawmakers into action in this case.

snlacks• 12 years ago

I don't really mind, but I see why people do. What bothered me is when I opened an incognito browser to look at Home Depot, then moved to Amazon, the latter was showing me a bunch of tools and MAN STUFF (weights, leather jackets, etc).

throwaway_xl5• 12 years ago

Nuance's commerce site gave me a half-price offer when browsed from Chrome on Android that was not visible on the same browser on Linux and Windows machines. I suspect that it was some kind of error since it wasn't declared as a special offer, just shown with a lower price. I was actually quite surprised when the lower price held all the way through online checkout as I imagined the stock and checkout functions would be managed separately from the main site.

newscracker2• 12 years ago

It shouldn't be difficult for someone to come up with a meta-search service that would search for prices from multiple geographical locations, different user agents and (with lesser likelihood) different user profiles. Such a service would also have to provide the user the ability to use the lowest priced profile to complete the purchase (although this may not work for all websites).

Is there already something that fulfills at least the first two criteria across a range of products, services and sellers?

harryjo2• 12 years ago

Not that the WaPo article links directly to a September 2000 article about Amazon doing a random (not demographic) price test, while claiming it happened in 2010. Does WaPo believe in time travel, or just cheap smears against Amazon?

If you use a Mac or Android, e-commerce sites may be charging you more

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