9 ms·

Why are prices online so unpredictable these days?

42 points by ericglyman 11y ago

steaminghacker 11y ago
i get this with flight tickets. they go up whilst im booking. If i don't book but wait, they go back down. anyone know how this works?
- CardenB 11y ago
  I'm still new to this, but, due to the low margin nature of airlines, flight pricing is pretty dynamic. The reason being that a seat is always available if you're willing to pay enough (they'll gladly rearrange someone's flight if you pay them enough). Though, this is an extreme example that rarely happens, the nature of price fluctuations is true across all flight prices, in an effort to squeeze out as much profit as possible. Source: recently started working on Google Flights
- anamexis 11y ago
  Have you verified this, for example with incognito and a VPN?
  - steaminghacker 11y ago
    I always use a VPN. However, i think it's quite possible to make an on-the-fly ID of a potential customer, that's valid, say, for a few hours. I know that cookies weren't involved here, because i clear everything all the time. Nevertheless, it's still possible from a browser fingerprint and the fact that the same flight is being queried. :-/
- aikah 11y ago
  Well they track your IP and have some models based on behavior studies where they figured out how they can extract more money from you. In fact it is a mix of algorithms and techniques, Tickets also vary depending on the day of the week, the hour when you check the price, your location and even the browser you are using or the OS!. I find it totally unethical but I guess that's what "maximizing profit" means for these merchants.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Yep, and so as a savvy consumer, I'm willing to modify referral URLs, construct false histories by sharing cookies or making cookies specifically to visit other sites which would lower my price, switch user agents out, and do quite a bit of other stuff which would take me only a few minutes to save possibly $50-100. My competition is the average consumer who will do none of this, so in the arms race, I can always be far ahead of I'm willing to invest some time to experiment and reverse-engineer the algorithms.
    - rokhayakebe 11y ago
      The Saving Game.
- frio 11y ago
  I've seen this with a local airline, but in their case I believe it's due to the relative scarcity of seats on a flight. If I start the processing purchase, I can see prices go up in another tab. If I finish the process (purchasing the tickets at the original price, mind), then the prices stay up. If I bail out and wait ~10 minutes, they go back down again (10 minutes is the length of time your flights are reserved before being released again). This fluctuation doesn't happen all the time; looking at the "book your seat" page, it seems to be correlated to the number of seats already booked and crossing some threshold. All of which may not at all be applicable in your case, but I thought it was interesting (/sensible) :).
- NeutronBoy 11y ago
  Throughout the booking process, they'll reserve the seats for you (so you don't get sniped while entering your details). This changes the number of available seats on the flight, which can push it over a threshold into the next pricing bracket.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Interesting awful business model idea: make lots of bots to click around flight reservation sites and hold seats to drive the prices for those seats up, then sell the seats your bots are holding for more than they're paying and less than the now-inflated price available to everyone else. I'm sure there's a name for this, not sure if it's legal. EDIT: bonus round: screw with airline algorithmic pricing algorithms so hard that all their models get so screwed up that they end up ditching the idea. Victory for everyone except the airlines. Use the arbitrage profits to push this agenda. I'm sure you'd get sued out of existence long before it ever worked (unless e.g. It's open-source and ran by individuals), but it'd be hilarious. This is the kind of stuff I'd fund if I were rich.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      Not sure I agree. Airplane seats are a scarce resource. The flipside of getting discounts for booking early, is paying more for booking late.
    - xur17 11y ago
      I don't think you can resell airline tickets unfortunately. Otherwise there would be companies buying up tickets months in advance, and then reselling them closer to the flight for a nice profit.
    - benjaminRRR 11y ago
      That's why you have to get your name exact, airlines now charge a lot for re-ticketing, the idea is to prevent this kind of arbitrage. In fact on long-haul travel if you misspell your name the airline will force you to create a new ticket completely and pay whatever the new price is plus a change fee (and you generally can't just cancel as there's often cancellation fees). If you hold without ticketing you have a limited time period you can hold, furthermore if you hold and cancel above a certain threshold the airlines will get upset and effectively block you from their inventory.
- mandeepj 11y ago
  Do you remember how much was the price increase?
  - steaminghacker 11y ago
    They know that people check a flight price then they go check hotels and other details for those days, then they come back to book the flight. People also check similar flights and those earlier or a bit later. They can see this pattern of a customer looking for the best deal. By the time you've figured everything and made up you mind to book, they know that you want to buy. This is when they increase the price. when you actually try to book. I often get flight no longer available at that price. some sites i have to start over, some offer me an increased price. here's a pattern i saw, for a flight to book 2 days ago: $775 (initial price) -> $779 -> $832 -> $895. This price ladder happened regardless of how i accessed the booking, ie through different websites. I decided i wasn't paying another 100 bucks and gave up. 24 hours (approx) later, i booked the same flight, through the same website for $785. The whole thing could be just random, but i've had this sort of thing before.
- ericglyman 11y ago
  There was a phenomenal study on that done last year (see: http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-deal-online-1414036862 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting...) by a group of Professors at Northeastern. Totally worth a read. Here's their full paper: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf
comrade1 11y ago
Install in your browser disconnect (2?) and cookie cutter (I think that's the name - sorry, on cellphone). It's a completely different experience on the web. Your cookies are deleted every session and all ad/monitoring links are blocked. Everyone thinks that this is the first time you visited their website.
- JetSpiegel 11y ago
  "Self-Destructing Cookies" on Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
  - comrade1 11y ago
    Yes, that's it. Thanks.
  - dopeboy 11y ago
    Is there an equivalent for chrome?
    - roymurdock 11y ago
      Edit - Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecghojagkcoehfhfknajofkokndjm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecg...
chrisamiller 11y ago
The service mentioned here (Paribus) seems great, but there is no way in hell I'm giving them unfettered access to my mailbox to scan for receipts. I understand that the balance between privacy and convenience is different for everyone, but this is way beyond my comfort level.
- gburt 11y ago
  I went to sign up as well and stopped when I realized what I was committing to. It is literally a factor of 100 beyond my comfort level.
- ericglyman 11y ago
  Hey Chris, one of the founders of Paribus here. Totally understand where you're coming from. One of our key goals is to make a service that's so easy to use that you never have to think about it (it will work in the background to save you money on all your purchases). Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions. That way you can have the benefits of automated price protection on your purchases, and fully separate your personal account. Happy to chat anytime on this too -- eric@paribus.co
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people. I'm sure you're aware of http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer ; could you do something similar?
    - ericglyman 11y ago
      Absolutely. It's a good point, but I think that option is actually even more of a hassle in practice. From much more experience doing this than I ever imagine I'd have, having to enter each and every purchase manually, deal with alerts, and then manually go back and forth with customer service is painful. There's more work to do on our end (we're early stage). But extreme user simplicity is what we're going for.
biot 11y ago
If you're looking at stuff on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel is your friend. Check out historical prices for most items and create alerts for when the price drops to what you want to pay for it.
- mysql102 11y ago
  Try PriceZombie - over 100 stores and it does price comparison between them.
Dwolb 11y ago
It seems like a more interesting approach to take advantage of price discrimination would be to execute 'persona swaps'. That is, if Amazon is offering me a microwave at $100 and offering you the same microwave for $120, could we digitally switch places so you could order the microwave at $100 if you wanted? A common method of e-retailer price discrimination is coupons so it'd be interesting to do real-time swaps in these situations too.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
RyanShook 11y ago
I tried out Paribus after it was on PH. It connected to my Gmail and Amazon accounts, scanned for a couple hours but didn't show me any opportunities for savings/rebates out of hundreds of transactions. Love the concept but probably won't be coming back.
- ericglyman 11y ago
  Hi Ryan, founder here. Just seeing now -- what happened on your end? Did purchases fail to load? Nothing drop in price? Would love to be able to learn from a not so great experience

42 points by ericglyman 11y ago

i get this with flight tickets. they go up whilst im booking. If i don't book but wait, they go back down. anyone know how this works?

CardenB 11y ago
I'm still new to this, but, due to the low margin nature of airlines, flight pricing is pretty dynamic. The reason being that a seat is always available if you're willing to pay enough (they'll gladly rearrange someone's flight if you pay them enough). Though, this is an extreme example that rarely happens, the nature of price fluctuations is true across all flight prices, in an effort to squeeze out as much profit as possible. Source: recently started working on Google Flights
anamexis 11y ago
Have you verified this, for example with incognito and a VPN?
- steaminghacker 11y ago
  I always use a VPN. However, i think it's quite possible to make an on-the-fly ID of a potential customer, that's valid, say, for a few hours. I know that cookies weren't involved here, because i clear everything all the time. Nevertheless, it's still possible from a browser fingerprint and the fact that the same flight is being queried. :-/
aikah 11y ago
Well they track your IP and have some models based on behavior studies where they figured out how they can extract more money from you. In fact it is a mix of algorithms and techniques, Tickets also vary depending on the day of the week, the hour when you check the price, your location and even the browser you are using or the OS!. I find it totally unethical but I guess that's what "maximizing profit" means for these merchants.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Yep, and so as a savvy consumer, I'm willing to modify referral URLs, construct false histories by sharing cookies or making cookies specifically to visit other sites which would lower my price, switch user agents out, and do quite a bit of other stuff which would take me only a few minutes to save possibly $50-100. My competition is the average consumer who will do none of this, so in the arms race, I can always be far ahead of I'm willing to invest some time to experiment and reverse-engineer the algorithms.
  - rokhayakebe 11y ago
    The Saving Game.
frio 11y ago
I've seen this with a local airline, but in their case I believe it's due to the relative scarcity of seats on a flight. If I start the processing purchase, I can see prices go up in another tab. If I finish the process (purchasing the tickets at the original price, mind), then the prices stay up. If I bail out and wait ~10 minutes, they go back down again (10 minutes is the length of time your flights are reserved before being released again). This fluctuation doesn't happen all the time; looking at the "book your seat" page, it seems to be correlated to the number of seats already booked and crossing some threshold. All of which may not at all be applicable in your case, but I thought it was interesting (/sensible) :).
NeutronBoy 11y ago
Throughout the booking process, they'll reserve the seats for you (so you don't get sniped while entering your details). This changes the number of available seats on the flight, which can push it over a threshold into the next pricing bracket.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Interesting awful business model idea: make lots of bots to click around flight reservation sites and hold seats to drive the prices for those seats up, then sell the seats your bots are holding for more than they're paying and less than the now-inflated price available to everyone else. I'm sure there's a name for this, not sure if it's legal. EDIT: bonus round: screw with airline algorithmic pricing algorithms so hard that all their models get so screwed up that they end up ditching the idea. Victory for everyone except the airlines. Use the arbitrage profits to push this agenda. I'm sure you'd get sued out of existence long before it ever worked (unless e.g. It's open-source and ran by individuals), but it'd be hilarious. This is the kind of stuff I'd fund if I were rich.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    Not sure I agree. Airplane seats are a scarce resource. The flipside of getting discounts for booking early, is paying more for booking late.
  - xur17 11y ago
    I don't think you can resell airline tickets unfortunately. Otherwise there would be companies buying up tickets months in advance, and then reselling them closer to the flight for a nice profit.
  - benjaminRRR 11y ago
    That's why you have to get your name exact, airlines now charge a lot for re-ticketing, the idea is to prevent this kind of arbitrage. In fact on long-haul travel if you misspell your name the airline will force you to create a new ticket completely and pay whatever the new price is plus a change fee (and you generally can't just cancel as there's often cancellation fees). If you hold without ticketing you have a limited time period you can hold, furthermore if you hold and cancel above a certain threshold the airlines will get upset and effectively block you from their inventory.
mandeepj 11y ago
Do you remember how much was the price increase?
- steaminghacker 11y ago
  They know that people check a flight price then they go check hotels and other details for those days, then they come back to book the flight. People also check similar flights and those earlier or a bit later. They can see this pattern of a customer looking for the best deal. By the time you've figured everything and made up you mind to book, they know that you want to buy. This is when they increase the price. when you actually try to book. I often get flight no longer available at that price. some sites i have to start over, some offer me an increased price. here's a pattern i saw, for a flight to book 2 days ago: $775 (initial price) -> $779 -> $832 -> $895. This price ladder happened regardless of how i accessed the booking, ie through different websites. I decided i wasn't paying another 100 bucks and gave up. 24 hours (approx) later, i booked the same flight, through the same website for $785. The whole thing could be just random, but i've had this sort of thing before.
ericglyman 11y ago
There was a phenomenal study on that done last year (see: http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-deal-online-1414036862 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting...) by a group of Professors at Northeastern. Totally worth a read. Here's their full paper: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf

comrade1 11y ago

Install in your browser disconnect (2?) and cookie cutter (I think that's the name - sorry, on cellphone). It's a completely different experience on the web. Your cookies are deleted every session and all ad/monitoring links are blocked. Everyone thinks that this is the first time you visited their website.

JetSpiegel 11y ago
"Self-Destructing Cookies" on Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
- comrade1 11y ago
  Yes, that's it. Thanks.
- dopeboy 11y ago
  Is there an equivalent for chrome?
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    Edit - Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecghojagkcoehfhfknajofkokndjm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecg...

chrisamiller 11y ago

The service mentioned here (Paribus) seems great, but there is no way in hell I'm giving them unfettered access to my mailbox to scan for receipts. I understand that the balance between privacy and convenience is different for everyone, but this is way beyond my comfort level.

gburt 11y ago
I went to sign up as well and stopped when I realized what I was committing to. It is literally a factor of 100 beyond my comfort level.
ericglyman 11y ago
Hey Chris, one of the founders of Paribus here. Totally understand where you're coming from. One of our key goals is to make a service that's so easy to use that you never have to think about it (it will work in the background to save you money on all your purchases). Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions. That way you can have the benefits of automated price protection on your purchases, and fully separate your personal account. Happy to chat anytime on this too -- eric@paribus.co
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people. I'm sure you're aware of http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer ; could you do something similar?
  - ericglyman 11y ago
    Absolutely. It's a good point, but I think that option is actually even more of a hassle in practice. From much more experience doing this than I ever imagine I'd have, having to enter each and every purchase manually, deal with alerts, and then manually go back and forth with customer service is painful. There's more work to do on our end (we're early stage). But extreme user simplicity is what we're going for.

biot 11y ago

If you're looking at stuff on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel is your friend. Check out historical prices for most items and create alerts for when the price drops to what you want to pay for it.

mysql102 11y ago
Try PriceZombie - over 100 stores and it does price comparison between them.

Dwolb 11y ago

It seems like a more interesting approach to take advantage of price discrimination would be to execute 'persona swaps'. That is, if Amazon is offering me a microwave at $100 and offering you the same microwave for $120, could we digitally switch places so you could order the microwave at $100 if you wanted? A common method of e-retailer price discrimination is coupons so it'd be interesting to do real-time swaps in these situations too.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

RyanShook 11y ago

I tried out Paribus after it was on PH. It connected to my Gmail and Amazon accounts, scanned for a couple hours but didn't show me any opportunities for savings/rebates out of hundreds of transactions. Love the concept but probably won't be coming back.

ericglyman 11y ago
Hi Ryan, founder here. Just seeing now -- what happened on your end? Did purchases fail to load? Nothing drop in price? Would love to be able to learn from a not so great experience