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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: 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