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The Atlantic has an extended piece on the realities of internet pricing:
As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn't soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon's price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year later, as Thanksgiving 2016 approached, the price again began whipsawing between two different points, this time $3.36 and $4.69.
We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. [...]
The right price—the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets—has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It's also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price—and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. [...]
Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.
While most SN readers likely are aware of the existence of pricing algorithms, this article highlights a number of recent developments that have basically ended the idea of fixed prices and returned us to the historical norm. In the past, retailers offered different prices depending on the situation and what they thought a particular consumer might be willing to pay. Along the way in this story are intriguing tidbits such as the history of haggling, the origin of fixed prices, the innovation of GM's tiered branding system to maintain different price points for different consumers, and some failed models of flexible pricing (e.g., the time an algorithmic price war among Amazon's 3rd-party sellers led to a paperback briefly priced at $23.7 million, Coca-Cola's failed venture to charge more at vending machines on hotter days).
Recent lawsuits threaten traditional pricing models further—such as Marc Ecenberger's suit against Overstock.com for selling him patio sets for $449.99 with a "list price" of $999 when Walmart's normal price was $247; he has been awarded $6.8 million in civil penalties though it's still under appeal. It's likely that we're going to soon see a more pervasive demise of fixed pricing and perhaps significant modification to the fiction of "list prices." Online retailers have increasingly complex ways of managing profit by steering customers' shopping experience, even beyond altering prices depending on the day of the week or time you are shopping. From the article:
Four researchers in Catalonia tried to answer the question [of personal price profiling] with dummy computers that mimicked the web-browsing patterns of either "affluent" or "budget conscious" customers for a week. When the personae went "shopping," they weren't shown different prices for the same goods. They were shown different goods. The average price of the headphones suggested for the affluent personae was four times the price of those suggested for the budget-conscious personae. Another experiment demonstrated a more direct form of price discrimination: Computers with addresses in greater Boston were shown lower prices than those in more-remote parts of Massachusetts on identical goods.
A final issue raised throughout the article is the psychology of the "deal." The reason list prices likely haven't yet gone away is because they still have a profound psychological effect on consumers, even when they know that everything is the store appears to the "50% off" all the time. For now, the illusion of the fixed price gives a sense of "value" to consumers, particularly for online shopping. But the disturbing aspect of the article is that shopping will increasingly come to resemble the old days of haggling and personalized pricing, except now the seller has a complete psychological profile of you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:27AM (13 children)
That's not haggling. Haggling means both parties get to engage in a negotiation. This new form of "haggling" is one party using machine learning and electronic spying to engineer a Hobson's choice [wikipedia.org] at the highest price they think you'll accept. There's no opportunity for me to counter offer with a lower price. I can't negotiate with Amazon's algorithm.
I'm seeing tactics like this more and more. The price for almost anything is some seemingly random amount. I'll use a work computer, or a VM, from another IP, and I'll see a totally different price for the same item. Amazon now has "coupons" that you have to "clip" by clicking on a button that then "reduces" the price, but only valid for a few minutes.
I resent being manipulated. It's why I block ads, it's why I skip commercials, it's why I try to stay as anonymous as possible. The more of this bullshit I detect the more I resent your company and the less I'll do business with you.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:57AM
Well looky at the Amazon shopper with the registered SN account. You're doing it wrong. I am Anonymous Coward. I walk to the store. I clip paper coupons. I pay cash. I post through a dozen proxies because every comment I post gets me IP banned.
Quit your fucking whining you entitled fucking nigger!
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP ...
Fuck you fuck you fuck you!!!
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:03AM (4 children)
You can negotiate, though weakly. You negotiate by being willing to not buy the product. It also helps to shop places other than Amazon.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:43AM (3 children)
I disagree.
Like many search algorithms, including that of Google and Youtube, they just want you to put extra effort into finding what you're looking for, sometimes. For example this [amazon.com] search of my Tommy Gunn penis extender requires at first glance a 40-dollar buyout, but if you look more closely the cost of the extender itself is only 14 bucks and the rest is aggregating a package deal against your request. Now view the following linked search and the aggregate price is not in the same place, however, you will have the same product priced alone on the top-left corner [amazon.com] at 20 bucks. Oh, wait, now that I just posted that link, the alternate prices disappeared. In the case of Youtube, they want to learn the methods you use to search for something specific so that they could circumvent it.
This isn't haggling in the direct-argument sense, but the kind of trickery UI designers use to justify their jobs -- move it somewhere else, except that now we're showing the higher-priced version of that instance alongside the other price. I first noticed this when trying to buy a Tommy Gunn penis extender from Amazon and saw a price of 30 bucks, when I knew I could get one at half-price.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:08PM (1 child)
Man I wish you'd share whatever you're on, lol.
GIMME, GIMME, GIMME!!!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:44PM
I don't think you really want to share his rotgut...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:48PM
$14.99 today from this VPN ip.
Not sure which is more worrying; that Eth0 is correct, that he knows the link to this product or the user feedback comments on that Amazon product page
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:28AM
I suspect Amazon might get the Microsoft treatment not too soon.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:50AM
There's no opportunity for me to counter offer with a lower price. I can't negotiate with Amazon's algorithm.
Nobody is forcing you to shop at Amazon. If you don't like the games, don't play. Haggling is not a necessary part of trade either.
I resent being manipulated. It's why I block ads, it's why I skip commercials, it's why I try to stay as anonymous as possible. The more of this bullshit I detect the more I resent your company and the less I'll do business with you.
And we see you get that.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 09 2017, @12:28PM (1 child)
Just to be clear, in the submission I wasn't saying Amazon's personalized pricing is akin to "haggling," but TFA mentions things like how eBay has also fundamentally changed the way people view pricing too. More importantly, it has provided a huge amount of data and "experiments" that have allowed more complex pricing models to be developed. It's not exactly the same, but eBay is perhaps somewhat closer to "haggling" in that there's often no fixed price, and you get to choose how much you're willing to pay. (Granted, eBay is technically an auction model, which is also a bit different; though individual buyer/seller transactions can come to actual "haggling" of sorts in my experience.)
Also, as others have noted, there are so many options to making internet purchases these days that consumers can instantly choose from a number of retailers with different price points instantly. You get to "shop around," also not just by place/retailer but BY TIME, which is perhaps even more like traditional haggling.
And maybe there is the best equivalent on Amazon: there are price trackers for Amazon just like you can sign up for a price alert for an airline ticket or whatever, so you can find out when an Amazon price drops to a point you're willing to pay. You might say you're not able to "negotiate" with Amazon, but that's sort of doing that -- waiting until Amazon offers a price you're willing to pay.
In any case, I used the term "haggling" not to claim that there was an exact analogue in today's market, but rather that the types of price searching and strategizing done by consumers can feel like the amount of work it took before the era of fixed prices to get to a price level you're happy with.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:58PM
> You get to "shop around," also not just by place/retailer but BY TIME ...
This. Perhaps an extreme example, we had a hanging radiometer in the kitchen window that fell and broke a few years ago. The replacements were over USD $50 for a similar 3"/75mm diameter one that hung up, it looked like someone had cornered that niche. Meanwhile, Google and eBay results were full of $15 versions that stood on a stand. But we wanted a hanging one.
I waited several years, searching from time-to-time and last fall found a company in Germany that sold me what I wanted for $27 including shipping to USA. It's spinning now, and I feel good about the purchase in several different ways.
Also made a stronger hook for the supporting length of monofilament, hopefully it won't fall again!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:02PM
Julian Assange... We have Julian Assange here!
If I want something, I will put it on a price watch: it's funny seeing lower prices being sent to you within a few days to try to entice you to buy it.
Usually, like with Steam, if you wait it will come up real cheap once it's popularity declines.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
With Amazon, your side of the haggling is putting the item in your cart and then abandoning the purchase. Online retailers see something like 2/3 of purchasers abandoning the cart, and are convinced that's lost money. See https://www.shopify.com/blog/12522201-13-amazing-abandoned-cart-emails-and-what-you-can-learn-from-them [shopify.com] for example.
Abandon your cart, wait for the ads to show up on the web, and the price will often be lower. Search for abandoned cart remarketing https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=abandoned+cart+remarketing [google.com] to see the various strategies retailers use.
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:42PM
I do this all the time and Amazon shows you a message if the price changes while an item is waiting in your cart. It almost always changes UPWARD.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:25AM
For example this old news from 2012: http://business.time.com/2012/06/26/orbitz-shows-higher-prices-to-mac-users/ [time.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @06:50AM
* price of everything
* value of nothing
Apologies @ Oscar Wilde