How Retailers Use Personalized Prices • Hacker News Board

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#151

Post by rahimnathwani » Mon, Oct 23, 2017, 2:57 AM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #124

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…

Sounds like grocery stores do it: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/supermarkets-introduce-person...

With the Safeway app, you don't get exactly the same coupons as your friend, but in my experience they're almost the same set. However, the app does achieve price discrimination without personalisation: people that are money-rich but time-poor won't bother checking the app for coupons before they go to the checkout, so will pay more than someone who pinches pennies.

But this form of price discrimination is not personalised. It's the same as that achieved with coupons published in magazines.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#152

Post by bo1024 » Mon, Oct 23, 2017, 3:38 AM UTC

tessierashpool wrote: post #17

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…

These services already exist, although I don’t believe they use the implementation you describe. Instead they’re basically coupon collectors. They just find the lowest available price and route you to it, or something like that. (I don’t use any of them, but they advertize to me relentlessly. I should probably try them out, actually.)

That's interesting. Are they actually using personalization to get better prices?

I'm thinking of scenarios where if two different browsers visit the same page, they'll get shown different prices depending on their cookies etc. In that case, a third-party site can't really "route you" to a lowest available price, they have to help you make the purchase from the right browser environment.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#153

Post by bo1024 » Mon, Oct 23, 2017, 3:45 AM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #38

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 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?

The first thing retailers will probably try is simply modifying their terms of service. I'm not sure what argument they'll come up with there.

An analogy I'm thinking of is, imagine the website has a box that asks you to input your age, then it shows you your price. If you put in a number over 40, the price will be higher. Now you can just put in a number under 40 and get a lower price, but their response would be to make it against their terms of service to "lie" about your age.

Similarly, they will equate using "someone else's cookies" to lying and claim it is morally wrong and illegal and against their TOS. Even though what they're doing is discrimination.

Re: How Retailers Use Personalized Prices

#154

Post by mijamo » Mon, Oct 23, 2017, 7:20 AM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #130

averagewall wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now buy flights direct from airlines because of the dirty tricks of resellers. They've been terrible at sorting out missed connections (please get a paper document in person from the middle-of-nowhere stopover airport to prove it was their fault, and not going to refund legs on a 2nd airline at all) and do dirty tricks like not actually booking your ticket when you pay but waiting till they expect to get it for a l…

It's funny that you think the airlines don't do dirty tricks. What reseller doesn't buy tickets when you book? They get paid when you buy, why would they refuse to buy?

As said, they want to buy when the price is the cheapest. Sometimes if you book a long time in advancr (eg 6 months) they will wait a few months before buying the ticket because their statistics say the ticket is cheapest 2 months before the flight. Occasionally it can mean they don't manage to book before the flight is full. Not all companies do that though, but many of the cheapest/shadiest do.