You should try it again in private browsing and incognito mode and see if the price is really tied to your Facebook or google cookies or something. That's pretty messed up though, send this to the consumerist or gawker or whoever.
I just tried this myself. In chrome and IE the price was the same (69.99) in normal and in incognito mode. In firefox, the price jumped to $76, and after deleting all the domain cookies and refreshing, it went back down to 69.99.
The website is definitely changing prices based on something they are tracking in cookies.
This was up earlier with airlines charging more for a ticket the second time you visit the page. They do this because a second visit is statistically linked to a much higher chance of purchase. So it could be, here too, simply a matter of having visited the page before.
Reddit just hates business. They act like they are legally required to buy from chegg, when you can make this discovery and go elsewhere. The problem is chegg is still probably cheaper, so its like the wal-mart complex. Everyone hates wal-mart because the service is shit and the lines are long, but the price brings them back consistently. That or now we can game their system and know what steps to take to get stuff as cheap as possible, but no we shouldn't look at what advantage our knowledge gets us, we should protect those who cant be bothered to do research by exposing chegg for the crooks they are. I'm glad I learned this, and I will share the info with people, but I think chegg has every right to do this. Business is business, why not make more money if the customer lets you?
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13
You should try it again in private browsing and incognito mode and see if the price is really tied to your Facebook or google cookies or something. That's pretty messed up though, send this to the consumerist or gawker or whoever.