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A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

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Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#231

Post by leeoniya »

abiogenesis wrote: post #210
soganess wrote: post #84

For people saying this to calculate the final price with shipping and tax, it's not (or at least not entirely). It is for this new sales conversion dark pattern where prices aren't listed until you add to cart. Ebay sellers are particularly bad offenders: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-1...

Google disagrees with you: > When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation. The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements.

this is what we've seen as well. it validates that whatever price, promo, shipping and taxes you've put into your feed is what ends up in the final checkout and there's no bait-and-switch going on between the feed and reality.

it's rather annoying because it creates dozens of "abandoned" carts per day which we have to continually clear out (based on Google's known ip address ranges) so our reps can go through actual abandoned carts.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#232

Post by [deleted] »

abiogenesis wrote: post #210
soganess wrote: post #84

For people saying this to calculate the final price with shipping and tax, it's not (or at least not entirely). It is for this new sales conversion dark pattern where prices aren't listed until you add to cart. Ebay sellers are particularly bad offenders: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-1...

Google disagrees with you: > When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation. The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements.

[deleted]

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#233

Post by habosa »

st1ck wrote: post #230
withinboredom wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do software engineers actually implement that? That seems pretty immoral. I'd rather let them run the a/b test and steal whatever solution they end up with.

I can't find reasons why would this be immoral. I'd say it's rather aggressive and won't earn you good reputation for sure. But it's sort of fair game. Compared to many business practices (lobbying, forced arbitration, patent trolling, DMCA, price dumping etc.) this is extremely mild one.

Generally active sabotage is frowned upon as opposed to winning in fair competition.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#234

Post by [deleted] »

kulahan wrote: post #147
pgbi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because pure news are pretty much free today. So newspaper need to provide something else: analysis, opinions, etc. to be able to sell something.

Not to mention we have metrics which tell us exactly what kind of reporting is most likely to have good reader engagement (and thus higher ad payouts). Most news sources are just giving us exactly what the majority of people want.

[deleted]

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#236

Post by innocenat »

bluntfang wrote: post #68
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all shipping charges can be calculated ahead of time. For example, you may offer free shipping on orders over $50. You may charge $9.99 for the first item, $5.99 for each additional item. You may charge by weight of the whole order. You may have oversized items or packages that can be combined to reduce shipping charges. Some items may ship together as OTR Freight, while others can go via the local postal service…

Well we can change this by including shipping as the total price and not give deals on shipping. Deals on shipping are dark patterns.

I don't understand. So if the item is $5 and shipping is $5 regardless of the number of items being bought, then if I bought 2 I should pay $20 instead of $15?

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#237

Post by Ed314159 »

Youden wrote: post #135

When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost. Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events. Lo…

In 1999 the "Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism" [0] was instituted with an endowment from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Who is "Eric Breindel" ... well Wikipedia includes this, as his legacy:

"In 1988, Spy magazine ran a feature that depicted Breindel as a ruthlessly career-driven opportunist whose career was effectively ended by his drug bust"

And regardless of accuracy, I consider this to be an excellent definition for whatever "Opinion Journalism" must be.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Breindel_Award_for_Excell...

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#238

Post by shultays »

input_sh wrote: post #171
shultays wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find not including tax better tbh. That way people are being reminded how much tax they are with every purchase.

Every EU bill should come with the price without VAT (value-added tax) and with the VAT applied, leading to the same result. The only difference is that the VAT is a certain % depending on your country (mostly 15-25%), making it easy for a merchant to calculate it with a single data point. Percentage is also always a fixed round number, so you can calculate it in your head when you stumble upon "+ VAT" somewhere with…

Yea, you still can get the info but how many people do really care. I am just saying the people would be more aware on how much they are being taxed. Imo making it obvious like US does would be more helpful even if it is not as convenient

I used to live in Turkey, where taxes on some stuff are insane but most people won't ever know because it is not as obvious. In a similar vein, income tax is also quite hidden in Turkey, at least from yhe perspective of employee

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#239

Post by toomanybeersies »

dahfizz wrote: post #215
supernova87a wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you don't know this, but the "A-hed" article of the WSJ is the humorous, light-hearted take on some cultural phenomenon that appears every couple of days. It's got a distinct separation (graphically) from the rest of the news, and is written not to be taken too seriously. (It's not so apparent in the online version, if you haven't read it before). So you don't have to worry that it's some broad decline in journ…

> It's not so apparent in the online version, if you haven't read it before. I think this is the core issue that leads to sentiment like OPs. Real news still exists, but it's the highly editorialized and opinionated articles that are shared more widely. News agencies universally are terrible at obviously differentiating the two to users. 99% of people when they open an article scroll directly to the content. But any…

Is it the news agency's fault, or the reader's fault? In this case, it really isn't clear that it's not "real news". But I see plenty of people on social media sharing articles from news sites where they're clearly marked as an editorial or opinion piece, and believing or treating them as if they were exactly the same as a news article that attempts to paint a neutral picture of the facts.

Do newspapers need to put an explanation of what an opinion piece is at the top of every opinion piece?

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#240

Post by ehsankia »

gruez wrote: post #14
whoisjuan wrote: post #8

This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process. I always have found that kind of shady but it's probably known to increase conversions. What I found interesting is that this an open attack vector for e-commerces. Multiple bots can hit a website and start addin…

> This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process. It's usually not possible because you don't know how much the shipping + taxes are until the customer enters the billing information.

I don't know if this is true, but I've been many websites that actually claim that they have an extra deal they can't show you until you put the item in the cart. I used to see those a lot a few years ago, not sure if it was a real legal thing or just a trick to get people to add it, but that was definitely a thing and not related to tax+shipping.
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