12 ms·

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

133 points by altern8 12y ago

click170 12y 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 12y ago
  Do you have a recommendation for which extension or extensions to use?
  - hsshah 12y 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.
  - newscracker 12y 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/ http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/
- altern8 12y ago
  I would say not widely known/used... I didn't know they changed prices like that :-/
- eloisant 12y 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 12y ago
So basically e-commerce sites are charging me more?
justcommenting 12y 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.
- altern8 12y 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 12y ago
  Time to remove OS information leakage from user agent string? Sites could still profile users by browser (e.g. Safari), though.
  - justcommenting 12y 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 12y ago
    It's not difficult to get figure out what operating system you're on without looking at the user agent string.
lorddoig 12y 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.
userbinator 12y 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 12y ago
  Using a shitty browser can cost you more [1]. [1] http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/ http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/
calbear81 12y 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 12y ago
I use http://camelcamelcamel.com 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-Approach-Edition/product/0136042597?context=browse 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-Thomas-Cormen/product/0262033844?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Edition-T...
- hrjet 12y ago
  But then, how would you be sure that web sites like camelcamelcamel.com are not price-steering you with false data?
  - cooper12 12y 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/daily21.html http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily2...
    - hrjet 12y ago
      That's a great point, but I think multiple approaches could be possible. For example, manipulating historical data to make the current price point attractive. That would be difficult for the user to verify.
pixelcort 12y 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 12y ago
Cue in Digital Millenium Retail Act prohibiting circumvention of technical measures of personalization (like turning cookies off with intent to circumvent personalization)...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
goforads 12y ago
It's worth reading the actual paper closely. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
newscracker 12y 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?
harryjo 12y 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?

133 points by altern8 12y 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 12y ago
Do you have a recommendation for which extension or extensions to use?
- hsshah 12y 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.
- newscracker 12y 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/ http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/
altern8 12y ago
I would say not widely known/used... I didn't know they changed prices like that :-/
eloisant 12y 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 12y ago

So basically e-commerce sites are charging me more?

justcommenting 12y 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.

altern8 12y 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 12y ago
Time to remove OS information leakage from user agent string? Sites could still profile users by browser (e.g. Safari), though.
- justcommenting 12y 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 12y ago
  It's not difficult to get figure out what operating system you're on without looking at the user agent string.

lorddoig 12y 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.

userbinator 12y 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 12y ago
Using a shitty browser can cost you more [1]. [1] http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/ http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

calbear81 12y 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 12y ago

I use http://camelcamelcamel.com 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-Approach-Edition/product/0136042597?context=browse 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-Thomas-Cormen/product/0262033844?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Edition-T...

hrjet 12y ago
But then, how would you be sure that web sites like camelcamelcamel.com are not price-steering you with false data?
- cooper12 12y 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/daily21.html http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily2...
  - hrjet 12y ago
    That's a great point, but I think multiple approaches could be possible. For example, manipulating historical data to make the current price point attractive. That would be difficult for the user to verify.

pixelcort 12y 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 12y ago

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

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

goforads 12y ago

It's worth reading the actual paper closely. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

newscracker 12y 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?

harryjo 12y 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?