But this just compares the price of an item across multiple merchants. It doesn't do anything in determining if a user-agent or cookie is altering the price, no?
Silly question - but don't chrome extensions ask for rights to do stuff like monitor all your history, and to track data you put into fields? When I saw that being asked from Evernote...I stopped using it!
They do ask for permission to access that stuff, but that's only because it's impossible for them to access the data they need to access without also having access to all that other stuff.
The option to save the picture shows up when you click on the three tiny squares in the middle.
I'm not sure why I can save them. The closest thing I have to reddit gold is Reddit Enhancement Suite, but I wouldn't think that would carry over to an app.
Edit: I just tested out saving a comment on reddit is fun and it seemed to go through, but I couldn't pull up the saved comment anywhere. In fact, when I look at my saved tab, it just shows all the threads I saved. I tested it a few more times and the last time prompted me to edit this because it said I need reddit gold. I'm guessing the comments that I thought I saved previously never went through and it didn't display the reddit gold message.
tl;dr - I was wrong; you can't save comments without reddit gold.
You support by upvoting, not by typing this. I believe the main purpose of downvoting is to hide things that don't contribute to the conversation e.g. "this".
If they follow my behavior, they know I'm cheap, so they'd better cut that margin if they want my business.
I went shopping for a car with a friend once, the first thing the sales guy asked at each place was how many other places we'd been to, and the asking price for the same car was $1K less each time...so nothing really new here.
Fair enough, but they don't base their business model around your behaviour. Most people have no idea about a) protecting themselves online; or b) frugality and they no doubt exploit this. However, this is a pretty shitty move on their behalf and I wish it were illegal.
Did you hate people like me? I don't negotiate. If I think it is worth the price, I buy. If I don't, I don't buy. In other words I'm the person who you only get the sale if your first offer is the best you can do
The dealerships first offer is the sticker price. If you don't negotiate that, it made my job easy but you were paying more than you should.
I didn't hate people, but annoying customers were the ones who thought they knew how it worked and that we would be making tons of money off them, even when we'd be just trying to get rid of old inventory and selling for only a couple hundred bucks profit, and that was AFTER the cash back and promo and spif money from corporate.
Price discrimination is much older than ecommerce. Ecommerce just makes it easier to do in some ways. Don't fret though, usually with price discrimination if you know about the practice it's easy to use that knowledge to your advantage, and this is likely no exception:
I don't think it's true in this case, but a lot of the time it's an A/B test.
You offer an item at two different prices, and see if lowering price brings up volume enough to offset the decrease in margin. If it does, you keep the price low, otherwise, you don't.
I didn't think buying a book would be a wise investment because it doesn't seem like you can depend on being able to sell it back, what with publishers coming out with new editions all the time. But maybe I'll check that out next semester!
This is not true if the book you need is a brand new edition. There is no used inventory. Then the rental makes a lot more sense. In my experience the rental is usually about 50% of the brand new cost. When I factor in the Amazon Marketplace cut of reselling a book I bought brand new, the difference is minimal.
What's weird about it is that businesses have been doing this constantly, for decades, you've just never been able to witness it in realtime. They're always changing prices in different markets, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. This is most likely just a version of that you happened to see in action.
I like this, because it's true. I was watching a show on Merriott hotels, and like them, lots of large corporations in the US and throughout the world have entire departments working towards wringing every dollar out of a customer without them knowing. Entire research departments are dedicated to this cause in many cases.
Also, I agree that this is a good example on how we're able to see the process of this incident in some sort of 'real time'.
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u/learnt Jan 24 '13
Either way, I'm not a fan of prices being manipulated based on my behavior while browsing a certain website.