Submitted 3 weeks ago by Nikls94@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
My girl was looking for a dress for Halloween. Yesterday she found one on Amazon for € 35 and put it in the cart, but did not buy it. Today she looked it up again and it was € 50 so she asked me to look it up with my phone with my Amazon account - it turned out to be € 23 for me, less than half of what it’s for her!
(TLDC - Price history tracking plugin)
Amazon countered piece tracking by introducing coupons that only apply at checkout. Some products only use coupons for discounting now.
Just be aware that these prices may not be the true lows.
That explains why I see coupons more and more. Ty.
Yes, and Prime-only discounts, so they cannot easily be scraped.
I haven’t experienced that, but I used to do my amazon purchases at the end of the month until I noticed all the prices get raised around that time. So now I shop without rhythm to not attract the price inflation worm
The price must flow!
Can OP (or anyone) provide a legitimate source for this?
From what I can find, Amazon and its partners do dynamic pricing (based on various algorithms) but I can find no evidence / source that it does personalized individualized pricing.
IOW, dynamic pricing is not done at the individual shopper level, but can be based on many variables like lightning deals, sudden spikes in demand, inventory issues (over supply / under supply) and various other factors which are not related to the individual shopper.
Anecdotal evidence is interesting, but not persuasive.
I haven’t seen any studies, I seem to remember there was some news reports many years ago.
I do know that I’ve stood in my living room, on the same wifi, and looked art the same item from Amazon on my phone and my brother in laws phone and seen different prices. But that’s just another anecdote.
Amazon doesn’t track users, but it does have various sellers selling the same items. The search results aren’t always in the same order and sometimes the price on the item page is based on whichever seller has that item.
For example, I wanted a faux leather jacket. I found dozens of them in various sizes from different sellers. Changing the size on one page changed the seller entirely.
This is an industry wide thing.
Some vendors detect if you are on a Mac, and the assumption is.you have money, and therefore the prices are higher
If they detect that you’re using a 19 year old ThinkPad with Arch linux, they aggressively increase the price on thigh-high rainbow socks.
changing my user agent to Brave so everyone thinks I lost my money to scams
Then what about 🐪🐪🐪?
Clear her browsing data and try again, this happens with flights too.
This is why fingerprinting is an issue.
Sidenote. I went to by a boxset of books for my partner and it was ~50 for the set, I got back to pay the next day and it is 100. On ye third day it is ~70 with a note that it is down from 110. Scumbaggery.
Use Firefox and max out all of its security settings. When you do this, the fingerprint protection is so good that not even Google can ID my PC anymore. I have to pull out my phone and confirm it’s me every time I log in.
Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50
They do the same as the airlines, if they see you have interest they raise the ticket price
Motels and hotels have been doing this for decades. Check out room prices in college towns on game weekend.
I learned about supply and demand in middle school.
Right, but that would be a whole crowd’s worth of demand. Why would you raise the price of something after only one person shows interest? One person is not “demand.” And also, there probably isn’t a finite supply of the product in question like there would be for hotel rooms in one town.
Yep. Dynamic pricing.
Other people have reported it with travel sites when looking at flights, you get different prices on a Mac vs windows.
Vendors of any ilk would love to be able to adjust prices per customer.
I need to try with my user agent set to a Chromebook. Maybe I’ll even get a discount.
Adblock premium cost is wildly different based on location.
Using a VPN I have found everything from $15/yr to $40/yr
You’re paying for an ad blocker? uBlock origin is free and fully featured.
I pay for Mullvad VPN, that’s €60/yr ($65)
I know it’s much but I prefer mailing them a letter with the money to stay anonymous
I am using mullvad vpn as well.
I am saying that AdBlock premium has a different cost based on your location, which you can switch with your VPN.
I buy IVPN sub with Monero, so it’s private. I’mma try Mullvad next time.
that’s just regional pricing. it makes sense and is pretty standard.
Some products have discounted prices for Prime members.
Neither of us has prime
I only serf Amazon on private without being logging in, if I find something I like, then I copy the link to my regular browser.
If you’re not gonna give a lurker a good price, I’m not interested.
Does no one cross ship any more for the best deal? I haven’t trusted online pricing in ages
What is cross ship?
What does that mean?
My guess is that it’s something like camelcamelcamel which shows the prices over time in a graph? Here’s an example of a frog plushie camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09RN4YCXG?context=se…
But does it fit you?
I wondered when this would happen. With all the data scraping, corporations are going to know your “Spending Potential,” and price items for you, specifically, according to your SP score. Believe it.
Yup, I have this same experience with my personal account vs. the business one I use at work. The business one has a higher price a lot of the time.
Well business will reimburse it so might as well get as much as they can. I’ve noticed it with hotels a lot.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 weeks ago
Sure it's the same seller?? I'm pretty sure Amazon does not show different prices to different people. But the same product is often offered by several sellers, with different prices. And if for example one of you has Prime and fast shipping activated, it'll show the fastest option. Which might be more expensive.
cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Price tracking systems like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel wouldn’t work if they started doing this. I can verify that, when I get alerts, the price on Amazon is the same as the alert price.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
yeah and I’ve done a lot of chatting about amazon products online at reddit, forums, etc over the last 15 years or whatever and never once have heard of people getting two different prices on the same amazon link.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Or they would appear to work and would just be providing very wrong information
IamAnonymous@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is the answer. I wanted to buy a pole saw and kept seeing different prices just throughout the day and later I noticed that it was from different sellers
chaospatterns@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah there’s a few reasons why the offer that wins the buy box (the term for which merchants offer is shown to the customer prominently) and is complex, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly sinister or designed to mislead. If one person has prime and the other doesn’t, it might weight more towards a prime offer which may be more expensive, a price from a merchant may have changed, or gone out of stock.