Show HN: an online shop that bargains with you

Because I intuitively understand that there is a fixed price floor, it just feels wrong. What's weird is that I don't get this feeling when I'm bargaining with someone in person. Even if we're trying to find an agreeable price, I don't feel like I've lost when we agree, just because he might go a little lower.

My guess is that this has a lot to do with instantly receiving the item in question.

"Why don't you make a move in my direction?"

I guess the Turing test remains to be passed.

Any kind of response like this makes it obvious the system is a lot less intelligent than it's pretending to be, which is a huge turn-off to me.

How about this:

1) based on previous spending habits of a user on the site, and/or credit score, social media profile or a simple age, location profile, the shopkeeper (system) knows a rough geodemographics / personality of the user.

2) First price shown is variable depending on this algorithm. Some users who are poor will have cheaper prices. Richer ones, or users who like to spend time haggling will have higher ones. I've no idea if this is the best strategy - but some game theory and psychology of shopping will be used for the algorithm, you can work that out :)

3) User is able to purchase, or haggle.

4) Different users have different floors.

5) RNG - Sometimes a user will get a product for much less than the floor. They will feel as if their haggling got them a real bargain, because they really did! Sometimes the retailer will not sell the product unless they are making a larger margin than before. Retailers who use the system will feel as if they are making a real profit, because they really will be!

How do you propose to deal with users who (eg) open multiple incognito windows in Chrome? Or will users need accounts and need to be logged in even to have a go? It seems like users will naturally want to game the system.

I felt the experience was cheapened by the fact that the 'bargain' button made it obvious that the starting price was very inflated. That is not always apparent to customers browsing in a store, and perception counts.

However I have a few qualms with this.

1. Most shoppers on the internet are using the internet for three reasons; (A) they are looking for the lowest price possible, (B) they are minimizing their shopping time, or (C) they are looking for something they can't find locally at a brick and mortar. If I were an (A) or (B) shopper, this is a huge turn-off to me. It is neither explicitly giving me the lowest price possible nor is it time efficient.

It might work with the (C) shoppers but that that would require some testing. Do you think a Fab.com or Etsy retailers would use this? [Not being snaky, an actual question]

2. The emotion of bargaining does not translate with e-commerce. To me, e-commerce has always been an emotionless experience.

Whenever I was buying something in Ecuador there was a certain rush I got when I locked horns with a merchant. We developed a certain bond when we finally came to an agreement and each party has thought they had won. That rush is missing here (for me anyway). I'd be curious to hear how merchants feel who normally do business this way.

My first offer was -$5,000.

Maybe your algorithm needs to work on negative numbers.

On the internet, no one knows your a dog.

Or cares, really.

The larger point is: you invited me to think of your children, without giving a compelling reason why I should even care.

This is the internet - it's depersonalizing, anonymizing, delocalizing, and dehumanizing. Pretty much the antithesis of everything related to traditional haggling.

So, tell me again: who are these children, what do they look like, how old are they? If they're old enough to work, why aren't they, etc. If they're not cute, by my cultural standards which you have only a small chance of guessing, then what's up with that?

It's much easier to either drive a customer away or raise non-germane questions during a depersonalized haggling event. It's also way to easy to have those questions begin driving the conversation in the customer's mind.

Note: I'm from a culture where haggling over price is not the norm and I'm not a fan of it. YMMV where you are.

Suggestion to fix this: either slow the site needs to bargain 10+ times, so people get "bored" with trying to bargain for the lowest price (while still not seeming like a "bargaining gimmick" too much) or say you lower it 3 times in a row, but if I try the 4th time, it raises the price again, and maybe put a snarky message like "I see you're trying to bleed us dry, so let's start over" or whatever. But do these raises in a pretty random way. I figure this would have the effect of having people not want to try to bargain too many times to get the lower price, because they would be forced into "starting over". So they might just agree with the 2nd or 3rd bargain.

The difference with in person bartering is that you're dealing with a real person, who can walk away from a deal, and who has actualy emotions and needs. I don't care if I offend this computer with my ridiculous offers and I don't see the market stall owner with children to feed.

1. Is that the lowest price you have?

2. Is there a cheaper price elsewhere? (Google search to verify)

3. Yes? See ya ...

4. No? I'll think about it.

Step 3 is a huge problem. First off, haggling requires a degree of exclusivity, either a) real: you're the only selling it, or b) imagined: you make someone believe you're the only one selling it.

If 3a is the case, awesome.

If 3b is the case, you can easily be caught lying to the customer, never a good place to be in. There are acceptable lies (called marketing) and unacceptable lies (pretty much everything else).

You don't want to get caught in the everything else.

It's an interesting idea (I can see a couple of use cases for it), but otherwise, I'd avoid haggling prices on the web.

Definitely agree that you wouldn't want to share the seller's bottom line in the event of a match. This would lead to built-in buyer's remorse. I gather this may have been for initial proof of concept, not long-term functionality. But you also need to think about the impact of masking the algorithm (see below) so it can't be reverse engineered (on the flip-side) and consider what information can and should be given about the process.

Agree with one of the comments below that slowing down the result may make for better user experience. This was (surprising) feedback we received for impassebreaker.com -- people felt "let down" when the match was revealed too fast. There's a game component here, and a big splash may be important. Then again, it does seem a bit deceptive to show a progress bar when the result is already calculated.

Subjective observation, but based on a decent amount of feedback. Users need to trust that the process is fair. Trust is hard. If you place the bottom line in context -- e.g., show your user what the comparative price is on other sites -- would that context make the bargaining process smoother and build more trust? Might it also make the site stickier? If your provide the comparison shopping data, then people won't need to leave the site to do comparison shopping. That may or may not make you more appealing to sellers, so perhaps it's not on point. As it stands, the process seems arbitrary -- I totally understand that this is an early sketch, but if/as you build it, I'd keep this in mind. I can't remember the cites, but I believe there's some research out there that suggests that people are more inclined to trust computers in a negotiation than other people. So you have a potential advantage if you make the playing field seem a bit more level. At the end of the day, what you may be building is a trust machine. Maybe it's different, but that's how I've thought of our platform.

Negotiation style is culture and language dependent. The verbal dynamic that works in the Suk won't necessarily work in Omaha. One isn't better than the other, of course. But if the goal is closing sales, you need to keep context and language in mind, and at a very granular level. Words and how they are presented are key. Maybe that's part of what the system learns.

Best of luck. There's some potential here, long term, for something very cool. I'll be interested to see where you take this.

What is the price of a similar item in other online stores? What does the potential customer finds appealing in the deal? Is it the first time the user tries to bargain for the same or similar item? Are there other items of interest (that the user browsed) we could throw in the bargain to make the user buy at the listed price? Or redirecting the user to a feature enhanced item for the same price.

Offering a lower price as soon as the user starts bargaining might also make him think that listed prices are not real prices.

The idea does not make any sense in my head. There is actually some research happening in negotiating AI, but they all focus around as a training material. It seems pointless to trade with a computer. As pointed out by others, negotiating is not one sided "drop price", but justifying price drops or offering/receiving something in return.

I am deeply sorry for giving this negative feedback.

In real life you wouldn't insult the seller by asking for 0$ but have to employ more social tactics to get a good price.

setInterval(function() { $("#price").val(0); $("#bid-button").click(); }, 100);

:)

I like the idea by the way.

Otherwise the artificiality of bargaining when the bottom is effectively predetermined seems like a waste of typing.

The algorithm shouldn't be dropping the price and the bidding process shouldn't let you drop your offers.

0,01 - "You got it for $NaN"