When Websites Won’t Take No for an Answer

I was booking well in advance - more than a month, and I was using the site after midnight.

There should be regulation against changing a price that is advertised, at least lock it in for a minimum of 5 or 10 minutes of selecting the fare. Bumping the fare up at the last step only a couple of minutes later is highly suspicious.

Instead, I just blacklist the sender's IP address. It's even nicer when the sender (e.g. LinkedIn) publishes TXT RRs for SPF in their DNS zone as it allows me to easily blacklist all of them.

1. If I start receiving spam I know who leaked my address

2. If I can't switch off the spam hose, I just delete the alias, which severs any way this website can contact or bug me.

It should be generalised. All it requires is a sort of index to remember who was given what alias.

(I don't think spam flags are personalized, so even to me future emails wouldn't go to spam. I could set up a filter, though.)

As I'd just noted in another comment, many senders use a mail service provider, and a single bad actor can have very bad knock-on consequences, even for mail which doesn't transit the MSP (SPF records listing MSP IP space).

For many major brands / companies, unsubscribes work reasonably well. I've seen some success with this, don't offer email addresses generally, and flag the remainder as spam, with blackhole rules in my various filtering tools.

The larger problem with email is I simply don't trust it any more.

Yes.

They presented a meaningless price when in situations where potential customers would compare them with competitors. Only when they can be sure that a customer would likely not check the price anymore (because they think they already know it or because of psychological reasons), they show the actual amount.

That's a very clear case of improving their own situation (better conversion rates) by worsening their customers' situation (higher likelihood of overspending, reduced ability to compare prices) and making them act against their own interests. This would be manipulation by the all of article's criteria.

Of course as a company you can decide do use that strategy - it's not your job to think for your your customers. But don't be surprised if consumer advocacy groups flag you and at some point you find people demanding a law against that practice.

More generally, I'd draw the line to "marketing" if you supply information to the customer that's either meaningless or misleads the customer, but could not possibly help them reach their own goals. (As in this case presenting an amount in the search results that has no practical relevance.)

I'd draw the line to "manipulation" even earlier, if you make a person act in a way that's against their own conscious interests in the moment. As I said, there can be rare cases in which that manipulation could even be wanted by the person, but I don't see that changing the fact that it's manipulation. It's different from "persuasion" where you make the person change their interests.

That instance seems very clearly manipulation. When the cost is known people don't buy, only when they've sunk time on the process do they buy - probably because they have to assume other sites in the field are equally manipulative.

Unless the full cost is available without going through the sales funnel I'd say it's fraud.

Say people come to the store after having seen the advertisement, but when they arrive they decide that after coming here all the way, they don't care to save $100 and they buy the car.

It is conceivable (even probable) here that if I had honestly advertised it as $20000, few would have come. Therefore, making this change would increase my conversion rates on my advertisements. The argument stated by you would mean that my behaviour is defensible, and that I should advertise prices I do not intend to deliver, allowing advertisement conversion rates to be my guide.

However, that's a classic bait-and-switch scam, a kind that is illegal in the US, and I doubt you'd find anyone who'd support it.

well, yes, non-distracting from completing checkout using the most-expensive options.