Online Price Steering

Repost

Margot Peppers for MailOnline: Price-steering: How e-commerce websites charge some customers more for the same item-- "According to a study by computer scientists at Northeastern University, many major e-commerce sites personalize prices per customer, depending on what software they use or their browser history."

Although I ran across this same thing, I wasn't aware this was a deliberate act. When I was looking to buy my security cameras online at a major online site the price for each camera was $100. I did a bit of searching on Google and was surprised there was another page on this very same site which offered them for $80. This was the exact same camera from the same retailer. So apparently they have two exact pages in two separate locations offering two different prices. A total savings of $80.

So it does appear they set up two different pages depending how a customer comes into the site. While I did not clear my browser's history nor try using a different browser that's something I'll have to try in the future.

Watch out for so-called 'free shipping' versus the total purchase price. Sometimes it ends up costing more. As do some of those offers that come in via email with discount codes. On a number of occasions I found items cheaper elsewhere w/o the discount codes.