Exposing price discrimination in online shopping (Marketplace)

Attention

online

shoppers on your brand, get ready to look for the

price

game in your

marketplace

, imagine these three shoppers in the same store at the same time buying the same product at the checkout, the first buyer is charged five dollars, but the next buyer pays only three dollars and the last only two, no one stops using coupons or loyalty points, so what if it doesn't seem fair? Tell the Internet that our shoppers are about to hit the web to help us investigate an emerging trend in

online

sales that retailers charge different customers. different

price

s for the same product, all based on your personal data.

I'm Allie Minton and I rarely shop online. I'm Grant LeClair. I regularly shop online and look for the best deals. I'm in no rush and pretty much just shop online okay everyone come take a seat welcome welcome our expert is Jesse Hirsch the attack guru who says price

discrimination

is a way for online retailers to make more money. It's about information. The more information they have about an individual, the more they can take advantage of. about your needs or wants, charge you a little more for something you really want, and perhaps charge you a little less for something you're on the fence about as a way to persuade you to make that purchase so they can ultimately charge you. a different price for the same product.

I want to ask them if they are willing to give up some of their personal information if it means they will get a better price, maybe in some cases, but not in general. Is it specifically for that transaction? Is it for other purchases? They're selling this? I am a private person and would like to protect my information. So how do online retailers track your digital footprints? What type of buyer are you? The websites you visit cookies. Any. A computer cookie is a small file that websites can place on your computer or smartphone, it allows them to collect certain information while you browse the web so they can target you with ads, for example, I'm at Wayfair dot CA, I'm going to go

shopping

for new towels and I came across these blue ones and I like them, but I'm not ready to buy them yet.

I'm going to see the latest news and when I get here, just the one-way fares here also now are not the only ones. Those who do this, but it's an example of cookies in action, retailers can also use this information to judge what they're willing to pay for something, so everyone brought a laptop with them, they also brought a cell phone and that. It means that you also brought your entire personal history online with you, so that's good news for us today because that's exactly what we want to test. We'll ask you to find hotel rooms, even a couple of rental cars.

We love each one of you. to search in the same city for the same dates and the question is: will they get the same price? Can they plug in and connect for us? Please, on their laptops, each of our buyers open a normal browsing window and then another where we have gone into incognito mode, allowing them to browse the web privately and then we have also asked them to open another window normal browsing on your cell phone because evidence suggests that prices on those devices could be different. First, we'll go to Travelocity look for Panama City Panama November 15th departure November 24th okay so everyone is ready your screens are loaded on your brands get ready search travel reservations are one of the most important components of e-commerce in all his trips as he walks away Travel giant Expedia owned several sites like Travelocity, known for its gnome and its promise of low fares, ask yourself wisely as we analyze the results, a few others to share, as well as a market survey about the habits and attitudes of online shoppers we asked around the year 2000.

Canadians and found that almost half shop online at least once a month, about three and four of us compare prices before buying, half of We too book a hotel room online directly at Travelocity CA, we are booking trips on our price test hotel rooms at Travelocity. The first thing we noticed in our nine windows is that not everyone gets the same results. Which was the first one that appeared? They are different in different browsers. This is known as direction. Websites display search results in an order based on what they know. about you and your spending habits, you have a loft in Panama as your first and what was the first one you got incognito, so Country Inn Suites is significant, it indicates the difference in prices of what each individual perceives as being able to pay. so it speaks to a certain level of customization in their brands.

Get Set Search We are now looking for hotels in London, but so far there has hardly been a problem. I got $2 off my cell phone compared to the web browser. Oh, so you have 282 on your cell phone to 80 incognito and 280 on your desktop. I also got the difference and the cell phone was $2.00 more than the laptop. Our team pre-tested Travelocity beforehand and found several examples of different prices for this same room in one case. 144 dollars versus 150 times 181 versus $200 270 versus 278 per night imagine a week for them to have new windows open, we change to a different site now what we want you to do is add Priceline and we are going to try another city, just go to Priceline, They add thousands of new deals every day with 60% off.

Priceline became the largest online travel company in the world with lowest price guarantees on everything you bought, we even dated the same guy we're going to this time Have you searched Orlando and are you going on vacation in March? The best time to be in Florida. Take me to Florida. Press Search. Anything immediately jumps out at you, so in a normal browser, the Radisson Hotel in Orlando has 124 compared to in. our NATO is 198 for the same hotel. Big differences, that's the biggest one so far I've seen. This time they seem to pay a subsidy to display their cookies, but it's hard to know when and where it applies, for example does it apply to car rental?

At Priceline I can now ask them to add a rental car to this search. What did they get online or exactly the same thing, but they grant notices of something immediately? A medium rental for $61 incognito, it's only $53 on your regular browser that I've had in the past. be very focused on getting and reducing the price of the car on my website so I'm wondering if you know I'm a bargain shopper and that's why I get the discount. Is it something that Jesse absolutely believes concedes consumer behavior in the past? They have a lot of leverage, they know E Hagins, they know he's looking for a deal, so they're trying to get that deal done as quickly as possible.

Bargaining is most often found at street vendors like this, so this one is $20 and can I give you 10 for it? in the war between buyers and sellers it used to be the only way to get to 15 $15 that's the lowest you can go you won't accept 10 10 no, but when the fixed price was invented a truce was called these days, although the truce is now over . and technology is the new weapon, as we are discovering in our test of online travel sites, it inflates the regular price from 567 to 572 if you think about it from a negotiating position, you know that the supplier is actually haggling with us, we are showing. different prices and yet we do not have the opportunity to negotiate and I think that would be possible if we knew their logic, if we knew what time of day is best, if we knew if gender, age or geography makes a difference, these are factors.

I think that should be disclosed, that's what Canadians think: we would like to know what happens on the other side of the screen. 88% say online businesses should be more transparent about the customer data they collect, use or share, perhaps because only 18% think we have control over what marketers know about us online along with to Seattle, one of the largest travel companies in the world. What would you say to Canadians, including our testers, who got different prices for the same thing? I think you should keep buying. your market the price game in your market we are testing online travel sites discovering numerous examples of different prices for the same hotel room in the same place at the same time the subsidy is getting a substantial discount much larger than Ali's coverage could Being price

discrimination

Our survey shows that Canadians are concerned that companies offer different prices to different customers based on our online

shopping

habits. 72% are concerned that companies continue these habits without us knowing. 66 percent don't know how to avoid it for our final test we're in. hotels.com and although you can't see it in the ads, it is also owned by Expedia, let's try New Year's Eve in New York City while we search through the results that raise suspicions, oh my goodness, 734 for the Belvedere.

Oh, first of seven, 12 for him. Belvedere Ah there you have it, you got 712 for the velvet rally and even the original price is different so you get what you say. Ally for the original price there 918 and 896, that's a big difference. New Year's Eve in New York is clearly a price point that many of us can't afford, but even if you can, you might want to look twice, especially on your phone. Another one I found was the High Line hotel on the computer at 675 and 655, which shows the same starting base price on the back, Nadya. and Ali also see a price difference for the High Line Hotel cheaper on their phones and incognito than a spotty browser, but you wonder why, so we book some trips on our own and look to Seattle for answers, so, can you make them yourself?

Do we want to know why there are so many price discrepancies from person to person, from browser to browser, even on different devices? What does Expedia really mean? So what does speed mean? Plus encyclopedia we're at the global headquarters of Expedia whose brands include Travelocity and quiet hotels, but 600 million people visit our sites each month Sarah Gavin is its vice president of communications. We have already shared our test results with her. You guys give us enough information so we can retrace the steps completely. Gavin offers a surprising explanation for the price differences discovered by our testers: They first went to the hotel's communications site, which is our US site, so they were tagged as US customers, and then in their incognito browser, they went to CA hotels first, so even though in the first one they returned to CA hotels they were still American. customer regarding our site and our hotel years, so open a new incognito window and now we will go to the quiet hotels.

This is what Expedia says when our testers opened a browser and typed hotels with the real name of the company they were taken to on their American site in the entire left window, there's the United States instead of Canada, there it goes, so it's hotel communication, so they clicked on the Canadian flag on this site and were taken to the Canadian site, but the Expedia system still saw our Reviewers are Americans and show them different prices, albeit in Canadian dollars, price discrimination. So is this how the site is supposed to work? In the NATO code example, the incognito traveler was seen as a Canadian traveler and the other traveler was seen as a US traveler and there are absolutely different offers, so you agree to give to different people different pricing is exactly what you do, we love giving customers something great and if that means they are traveling internationally, if that means they are on mobile if that means they are booking as a package if that means they are members absolutely and that's price discrimination our customers tell us it's amazing, it's amazing, maybe amazing, but not very transparent or in line with the company motto if the motto is best price guaranteed, why does it matter if Am I purchasing incognito or in a normal browser?

Why are the prices different if it is supposed to be the best guaranteed price? It won't be any different if you are a Canadian customer, tell that to our testers who are Canadian and got different prices and had no idea why the big difference between the incognito price tends to be higher for all cars and for Priceline, the site where he found differences in the prices of hotels and rental cars. Says priceline.com never intentionally raises prices for a customer versusanother based on your browsing, cash or search history. However, they do, they lower prices when they can offer better deals, so how widespread is this type? of price discrimination in the offline world, like here in a cinema, older people pay less, it is a form of price discrimination, but it is transparent and it is a discount that is available to many people online, how can we know when it's happening?

In fact, I did all my Christmas shopping. online except you did everything Doug Stephens warns that these new ways of pricing there is more to come the entire world is basically changing the entire world of retail everything all the conditions that gave rise to the retail we see around us today are being breaking down completely Doug is a retail futurist and advises some of the biggest names in the industry. He says personal pricing makes a lot of sense for retailers. We go back even 20 years ago, when the only option as a retailer was to choose a price and put it on the product. true, you were doing two things: either you were selling too cheap to consumers who could have paid more for the item or you were turning away consumers who didn't want to pay as much, which is why retailers are always trying to get the optimal price for an item. product. the difference is now they can, now they can use technology to do that.

We show you how to get this system plus price tracking on Amazon. Oh, that's crazy, that's unfair, you'd feel ripped off. This is your market. Do you have a story you want? us to investigate write to us market at cbc.ca the real deal in your marketI need more proof that online prices are everywhere on the map, just hop in an Uber when it's rush hour or after the bars suddenly close. A ride that normally costs $10 now costs 15. Hoover calls it price gouging and many others are doing it to take on Amazon. For example, it is the largest e-commerce site; 61% of the people we asked buy on Amazon, but many are surprised to hear: it uses markup prices.

Amazon is actually changing their prices millions of times a day on almost every item on the site which is going to be great news for people, yes, and Amazon is doing this because they are taking into account a wide variety of different considerations, which is the popularity of that item, what are the seasonal factors that may be affecting the price of that item. What are the competitive factors? They put all of that together into these algorithms that are constantly, you know, analyzing these different prices. In fact, Amazon prices fluctuate so often that it's like a guessing game.

You guys want to play a guessing game with us, so we. I thought I'd play one using this webcam so you can see one of these things before, oh yeah, tell me how much do you think it costs sixty eighty or one hundred and twenty dollars online, yeah, pick eighty eighty sixty, yeah, so what if I make it easy ? for you guys, it actually costs all three prices, which doesn't make it any easier, which makes it more confusing to clear up the confusion. We present a graph from a site that tracks prices on Amazon. This is actually a graph of what works with this webcam. costs over the last year, do you see how it goes up and down like that?

Yeah, that was interesting, it bottomed here at sixty, then it went up to eighty and then the highest price, one hundred and twenty dollars, yeah, and then look at this, this is just the last couple of weeks okay, so here was the October fifteenth, only sixty dollars and then there it is, in a matter of weeks, almost a 50% increase, that's crazy, same webcam, different price, how would you feel if you were the guy who paid a hundred? and twenty dollars and someone else got their sixty right, you would feel cheated. Pricing has always been a mystery, but who really knows how much something should cost, but it's even more so with things like dynamic pricing and price discrimination, so here are some gaming tips. a system trying to game, you go incognito and look at the products using a private browsing window to see if the price is higher or lower in that mode without your history or you can also delete your third party cookies if you want to see the prices unchanged . by your history along with less targeted ads use price tracking tools to watch prices and receive alerts when prices drop, as our testers have their own conclusion, it is not fair that our spending habits, our purchasing habits are tracked , their only one-way barter. and it's a little unfair to be able to set the parameters of what they can see, so at least you have some control back in your hands.

I need to be a little more diligent in using technology from different platforms to really find the best price, especially when the prices can cost you your privacy travel nightmares delayed about three times before deciding to cancel the place slow customer service heck what are they their flight rights didn't seem to matter at all we are going after people with power if an airline is not found when they break the rules then why should they follow the rules?