Guess, will have to use a cheap phone to book my flight tickets next time. :-P
How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
71–80 of 154 posts
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#72At 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 really like this, why not dynamic purchasing if consumers are increasingly confronted by dynamic pricing? Are there reasons why this wouldn't work? I am curious what would the legal challenge be if dynamic pricing on the sell side is considered acceptable?
I wonder if there would be a case where the technology is patented. Then some startup is acquired and the same consortium ends up owning both the tech to dynamically price and the tech to dynamically purchase..
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#73At 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 don't. At least we didn't.
Here's the real problem:
1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure;
2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops.
1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...
You must load the entire page and figure out where the attributes are in a smart way. You can do this today with headless chrome, in the old days with Selenium, etc.
... which brings us to 2. A mainstream, regionally-dominating shop, particularly any that adopt the marketplace model (Amazon, Taobao, etc.) may have as many as 20 million products. Given 2., good luck refreshing this price list in a sane time, even if you crack the attribute extraction.
If by some miraculous feat you solve these issues you now have to product match an inventory of billions of listings, most of which are misspelt, missing attributes (brand, etc.), and use photos that even a human could not match by sight. Think how hard it is to find exactly what you want on eBay...
The only way is to get the data directly from the retailers. Assuming they will give it to you, you end up with the same problem of feed poisoning that you have with marketing.
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't. At least we didn't. Here's the real problem: 1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure; 2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops. 1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...…
Oh wow, so it’s far worse than I thought. So the only way is to best-guess pricing models?
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't. At least we didn't. Here's the real problem: 1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure; 2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops. 1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...…
Oh one thing you could do: Create a huge community of users who share their purchase data and other data.and then build the model through that died so if you want to participate and save you need to be part of the panel
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#76At 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 really like this, why not dynamic purchasing if consumers are increasingly confronted by dynamic pricing? Are there reasons why this wouldn't work? I am curious what would the legal challenge be if dynamic pricing on the sell side is considered acceptable?
Morally it seems fair. But like most things in our system, I'm sure it will end up being rigged legally in the big guy's favor.
Look at our system now. Big capital can move their tax headquarters to Ireland, its service center to India, its manufacturing to China. Hell, they can now even import low wage workers to the EU and US on visas if it will give them an advantage.
But good luck to any consumer trying to buy products at the same prices sold in these same places (e.g. pharmaceuticals). Even digital goods like games, music, and movies are priced differently, but consumers can never take advantage of currency arbitrage as companies ban VPNs, track IPs, restrict payments by the address of credit cards, etc.
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#77I have recently learnt it is same with energy companies. My monthly contract prices were hiked up to get more out of heating bill for energy company. I was left disgusted since we live in a relatively warm house and energy bills are minimal. After spending an hour with support - it became clear that prices are tailor made for postcode - read each individual home.
At least where I live, gas and electric are pretty heavily regulated, and fees are itemized to where I can tell you how much I pay per kilowatt for decomissioning hydroelectric dams.
PG&E does offer equal payment plans, where you pay the same amount every month, but they still track usage and bill/credit you every year for the difference between their estimate and your reality.
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#78In some hotels, when paying less for a room, you might actually get a worse room. Some rooms have cracking beds or bad wifi reception. That is why you might find different prices for similar rooms in a hotel.
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I doubt this had little to do with any relationship between linux users and their likelihood of overpaying on a hotel room or rental car.
The price paid by Linux users was almost certainly bumped up by Linux gamers explicitly trying to support game studios who supported Linux.
You wouldn't see the same thing with hotel rooms or most other products that weren't intimately tied to the OS itself.
Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, there was (or is) a inverse correlation between how common an OS is on the desktop (Windows, Mac OS, GNU/Linux; starting with the most common OS) and the amount people are willing to pay for a HumbleIndieBundle release.
This is presumably partly because customers appreciate that game studios see their chosen OS as a viable release target.