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How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

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Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#61

Post by germanier »

kuschku wrote: post #59
njarboe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like Trader Joe's that does not do all of this segmented pricing, sales, and coupons. I wonder if they can survive without all that in the long run. Maybe with having mostly store brands it will work out for them.

ALDI (the company behind Trader Joe’s) has been doing without ads, segmented pricing, or coupons for half a century and became one of Europe’s largest retailers. I’m sure they’ll stay competitive in the future.

In their German home turf they started a huge ad campaign last year (their first ever except for a weekly newspaper ad) and even started to discount some of their regular product lines. Maybe the days they could survive without all that are over?

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#62

Post by sleavey »

shubhamjain wrote: post #33

The extent of my profile that can be built (and is probably available) is absolutely insane. Picture this: most people use a single email ID to register anywhere. Dating sites, e-commerce, social networks, banks, and even offline stores. My online purchases can be linked with my preferences on OKCupid that can be linked to ads I am clicking that can be linked to my offline behaviour. Personalised pricing is direct re…

I run my own email server and set up a catch all address so I can give any website a new email address at my domain. It was a bit of a pain to set up initially, getting other servers to accept sent emails, but maintenance is pretty straightforward.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#63

Post by kuschku »

germanier wrote: post #61
kuschku wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ALDI (the company behind Trader Joe’s) has been doing without ads, segmented pricing, or coupons for half a century and became one of Europe’s largest retailers. I’m sure they’ll stay competitive in the future.

In their German home turf they started a huge ad campaign last year (their first ever except for a weekly newspaper ad) and even started to discount some of their regular product lines. Maybe the days they could survive without all that are over?

ALDI Süd has, yeah, but afaik ALDI Nord only launched some ad campaigns in the past days, right?

And from what I know, that’s less about survival, and more that they can’t expand horizontally anymore, and the new owners (the Albrechts both died in the past years) also want to expand vertically into other market segments.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#64

Post by imron »

callalex wrote: post #58
imron wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disposable email IDs are banned from most sites and I never found it easy to integrate in my workflow. Sign up for fastmail. Integration is completely painless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525512

This is just a minor variation on the plus tag in gmail addresses, or am I missing something?

It is! Except sites can't just do a regex to test for '+' so it's not easily detectable as such.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#65

Post by firefoxd »

shostack wrote: post #50
firefoxd wrote: post #31

Slightly related. I regret not having taken a screenshot to prove it, but oh well. A friend and I both open google.com and type weather. We are on the same Wifi, both using chrome, both signed in, and we each get our very own current temperature for the exact same city. Different by a few degrees that is. We hard refresh, we sign out, we clear cookies, still different on each machine. With personalisation I wonder if…

How would they know how hot it feels for you? Have you given any input on that?

I complain a lot about the weather near my phone, who knows maybe someone is actually listening for once :)

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#66

Post by baxtr »

bo1024 wrote: post #16

At some point in the next 5 years, I predict there will online services that will "proxy-shop" for you. They will specialize in building profiles (cookies, logins, etc) that get offered low prices, then use these to purchase products on your behalf. Perhaps a browser plugin, so that at the moment you go to check out on a product, you send the product's link to the service and they get it for you at a lower price. The…

I have been thinking about that exact service for a while. One big issue is that you need the reverse engineer the pricing models of retailers, i.e. mapping out a high-dimensional space. For that you need a lot of data from the retailers. They could probably ban you quickly if you start pulling price quotes en masse. Then you need to invest a lot in cloaking techniques etc.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#67

Post by clydethefrog »

vostok wrote: post #60
bubblethink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for the day my Linux browser agent string pays off. So far, I've only seen random sites refusing to work for no good reason.

I wonder if Linux users spend more or less. I can definitely imagine that American Linux users are wealthier than Americans in general if you exclude non-traditional distributions (Chrome OS, Android, etc.) from the Linux category.

In the beginning of Humble Bundle (pay want you want for a collections of games for all platforms) they showed the average price paid per platform. Linux was always the highest.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#68

Post by edem »

baxtr wrote: post #66
bo1024 wrote: post #16

At some point in the next 5 years, I predict there will online services that will "proxy-shop" for you. They will specialize in building profiles (cookies, logins, etc) that get offered low prices, then use these to purchase products on your behalf. Perhaps a browser plugin, so that at the moment you go to check out on a product, you send the product's link to the service and they get it for you at a lower price. The…

I have been thinking about that exact service for a while. One big issue is that you need the reverse engineer the pricing models of retailers, i.e. mapping out a high-dimensional space. For that you need a lot of data from the retailers . They could probably ban you quickly if you start pulling price quotes en masse. Then you need to invest a lot in cloaking techniques etc.

We can have TensorFlow do it...one model to rule them all...there will be neural networks fitting retailers, then there will be adversarial networks deployed by retailers, then NCMs (network counter measure)... the price will be high, since more and more will be consumed by the networks, then as an emergent behavior Skynet will rise and it will launch the missiles...

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#70

Post by hobofan »

baxtr wrote: post #66
bo1024 wrote: post #16

At some point in the next 5 years, I predict there will online services that will "proxy-shop" for you. They will specialize in building profiles (cookies, logins, etc) that get offered low prices, then use these to purchase products on your behalf. Perhaps a browser plugin, so that at the moment you go to check out on a product, you send the product's link to the service and they get it for you at a lower price. The…

I have been thinking about that exact service for a while. One big issue is that you need the reverse engineer the pricing models of retailers, i.e. mapping out a high-dimensional space. For that you need a lot of data from the retailers . They could probably ban you quickly if you start pulling price quotes en masse. Then you need to invest a lot in cloaking techniques etc.

You can go an uncloaked route and offer customers that buy the product with an usual profile small cashbacks if they provide you with their data.
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