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How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

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Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#141

Post by gwenzek »

nopzor wrote: post #123
ubernostrum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, while people here are thinking mostly about retailers like Amazon, I'd say that even with all the data they have and the processing and engineer power they throw at it, they still haven't caught up to the airlines in terms of efficiency at determining how much people are willing to pay for something. Airline yield management -- which includes both setting the price buckets for different fare classes, and decidi…

Yeah airlines "yield management" and "pricing" departments are indeed a black art. But, by and large, they're still not "personalizing" pricing. Instead they are basing pricing on factors like demand, destination, whether you're doing a Saturday stay (business travelers wont, so they'll charge more), how close you are to departure, etc etc. Plus they're now tweaking their frequent flier programs as a way to encourage…

They also charge you more if you visit their website several times in a row or if you look up the prices from a Mac book. So that's personalized.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#142

Post by gruez »

digitalengineer wrote: post #119
baxtr wrote: post #66

Earlier 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’re over-thinking it, I think. All you need to do is provide a service that makes the E-commerce website think you’re not a big spender: geo: live in a poorer neighborhood, and age/gender/preferences must be the most optimal for you not them. Each experience (as they call it was pre-defined and pre-build).

how are you going to hide your shipping address? by using reshipping services?

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#143

Post by dclowd9901 »

crdb wrote: post #73
baxtr wrote: post #66

Earlier 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...…

Funny, I had a lot of overlap in this kind of smart data quantizing when I was trying to build a venue page crawler that would intelligently mete out live music event dates, times and locations. I realized about 20% into the project I'd need some form of machine learning and then bailed.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#144

Post by LarryMade2 »

On a related note - Recently I've noticed that pricing, or more specifically menu selection, is also happening in brick and mortar shops.

Going to a McDonald's, I noticed their menu boards went displaying children's meals or value items during my last visit - looking around the window and floor ads, I did see mention of discount items available but nothing in the menu-board slideshow.. Didn't think of asking at the time, thought it was odd, now I have come to realized they were gaming me for higher sales items.

Now will stick to establishments with printed menus and non-video menu boards.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#145

Post by maksimum »

gruez wrote: post #142
digitalengineer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re over-thinking it, I think. All you need to do is provide a service that makes the E-commerce website think you’re not a big spender: geo: live in a poorer neighborhood, and age/gender/preferences must be the most optimal for you not them. Each experience (as they call it was pre-defined and pre-build).

how are you going to hide your shipping address? by using reshipping services?

You only provide the shipping address once you've been given a price quote.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#146

Post by wallacoloo »

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…

I'd be more inclined to believe your queries were just handled by different servers that had cached different sets of data. Seems more likely if you had different DNS settings than your friend, too.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#147

Post by junetic »

smn1234 wrote: post #93
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…

why have something/someone purchase for you on your behalf when you can browse through aggregators to find what you like? For instance, there's shopittome. I'd much prefer to select from a list of offerings and sources rather than pay premium for someone/something placing the order and then having to navigate obstacles to return (where accepted) if the item is ill fit. Not just limited to fashion here... electronics,…

How do you like shopittome btw? We're working on a similar service for higher end fashion, but aim to be more personalized with product types, colors, styles..etc:

http://www.tryforager.com

Would love to hear what you think (currently in beta on fb messenger)

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#148

Post by muxator »

jstanley wrote: post #111
Spivak wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not get an ad blocker? Good for attention, privacy, and security.

I do on my computer, but I watch a lot of YouTube on my phone. I ran AdBlock Plus for a while until I discovered that it runs as an open proxy, allowing anyone on the same wifi network as you to fetch content through your phone. In combination with a VPN client that routes everything over the VPN, I considered that an unacceptable risk.

Could you elaborate on the "open proxy" part? I now switched to unlock, but still miss adblock plus interface. This could help me not switching back

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#149

Post by ubernostrum »

nopzor wrote: post #123
ubernostrum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, while people here are thinking mostly about retailers like Amazon, I'd say that even with all the data they have and the processing and engineer power they throw at it, they still haven't caught up to the airlines in terms of efficiency at determining how much people are willing to pay for something. Airline yield management -- which includes both setting the price buckets for different fare classes, and decidi…

Yeah airlines "yield management" and "pricing" departments are indeed a black art. But, by and large, they're still not "personalizing" pricing. Instead they are basing pricing on factors like demand, destination, whether you're doing a Saturday stay (business travelers wont, so they'll charge more), how close you are to departure, etc etc. Plus they're now tweaking their frequent flier programs as a way to encourage…

You did a hidden-city ticket, is what you mean.

Airlines don't much care for that, and are known to shut down frequent-flyer accounts or take other punitive actions against you if you do that.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#150

Post by rahimnathwani »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #121
rahimnathwani wrote: post #118

Summary: Except for auto dealerships, retailers don't use personalized prices. What a terrible article: 1) Its first example of "personalized pricing" isn't actually personalised: it was the result of an A/B test. 2) It says 'Outsize profits can be extracted from “top of the demand curve” customers' when, in fact, the top of the demand curve is normally when price is zero. The author seems to acknowledge this as they…

The A/B test only explained the comparison between apps. The spokeswoman said they personalize based on web vs mobile app and logged in vs logged out.

That's not personalisation. Many (most?) people use both web and mobile. And do you always remember to log in before you do a search on Orbitz? Or are you sometimes logged in and sometimes not?
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