Why are prices online so unpredictable these days? | Hacker News Reader

Why are prices online so unpredictable these days?

blog.paribus.co

42 pointsericglyman41 comments

The service mentioned here (Paribus) seems great, but there is no way in hell I'm giving them unfettered access to my mailbox to scan for receipts. I understand that the balance between privacy and convenience is different for everyone, but this is way beyond my comfort level.

I went to sign up as well and stopped when I realized what I was committing to. It is literally a factor of 100 beyond my comfort level.

Hey Chris, one of the founders of Paribus here. Totally understand where you're coming from. One of our key goals is to make a service that's so easy to use that you never have to think about it (it will work in the background to save you money on all your purchases).

Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions. That way you can have the benefits of automated price protection on your purchases, and fully separate your personal account. Happy to chat anytime on this too -- eric@paribus.co

That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people. I'm sure you're aware of http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer ; could you do something similar?

Absolutely. It's a good point, but I think that option is actually even more of a hassle in practice.

From much more experience doing this than I ever imagine I'd have, having to enter each and every purchase manually, deal with alerts, and then manually go back and forth with customer service is painful. There's more work to do on our end (we're early stage). But extreme user simplicity is what we're going for.

Providing an option for manual forwarding for power users or the slightly paranoid would be nice. I use a paid email service (Fastmail) to minimize data mining, so I can't just make a new account for online shopping. I'd have to either pay for a new account or set up a free one, but giving my purchase history to Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, would largely defeat the purpose of my paid email account. Amazon already collects enough data on me.

I really like the idea of the service, though. It just doesn't work for me as it is right now...

That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people.

Until you save one person a couple of thousands on a large purchase. I wonder if they could do this with car purchases or similar high-ticket items.

Would it be possible to provide an address that receipts could be forwarded to? Similar to how Tripit works where you forward travel plans to plans@tripit.com and they are connected to your account based on the sender address. Reciepts could still be sent automatically by creating an auto forward rule.

Most people use Gmail, which doesn't have auto-forward capabilities. (intentionally, I think)

You can auto-forward if you can confirm ownership (or at least control, by clicking a link) of the address.

False. Forwarding is an action you can set on any filter.

Instead, setup a forwarding email address were people can just forward receipts to you. With some care people can create rules to do it automatically.

Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions.

If the user would forward things to this account (either manually or automatically) that would work, but few, if any, places make a distinction between your ability to login and the identity you use to receive email, so you couldn't divorce the authentication from the notification. This account would also get password recovery emails, for example, and potentially expose more than just the receipt emails. It would partition the more personal stuff, but is only a partial solution.

Manual forwarding seems like a sensible solution.

If you're looking at stuff on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel is your friend. Check out historical prices for most items and create alerts for when the price drops to what you want to pay for it.

Try PriceZombie - over 100 stores and it does price comparison between them.

It seems like a more interesting approach to take advantage of price discrimination would be to execute 'persona swaps'.

That is, if Amazon is offering me a microwave at $100 and offering you the same microwave for $120, could we digitally switch places so you could order the microwave at $100 if you wanted?

A common method of e-retailer price discrimination is coupons so it'd be interesting to do real-time swaps in these situations too.

I tried out Paribus after it was on PH. It connected to my Gmail and Amazon accounts, scanned for a couple hours but didn't show me any opportunities for savings/rebates out of hundreds of transactions. Love the concept but probably won't be coming back.

Hi Ryan, founder here. Just seeing now -- what happened on your end? Did purchases fail to load? Nothing drop in price? Would love to be able to learn from a not so great experience

i get this with flight tickets. they go up whilst im booking. If i don't book but wait, they go back down. anyone know how this works?

I'm still new to this, but, due to the low margin nature of airlines, flight pricing is pretty dynamic. The reason being that a seat is always available if you're willing to pay enough (they'll gladly rearrange someone's flight if you pay them enough). Though, this is an extreme example that rarely happens, the nature of price fluctuations is true across all flight prices, in an effort to squeeze out as much profit as possible.

Source: recently started working on Google Flights

Have you verified this, for example with incognito and a VPN?

I always use a VPN. However, i think it's quite possible to make an on-the-fly ID of a potential customer, that's valid, say, for a few hours. I know that cookies weren't involved here, because i clear everything all the time. Nevertheless, it's still possible from a browser fingerprint and the fact that the same flight is being queried. :-/

Well they track your IP and have some models based on behavior studies where they figured out how they can extract more money from you. In fact it is a mix of algorithms and techniques, Tickets also vary depending on the day of the week, the hour when you check the price, your location and even the browser you are using or the OS!. I find it totally unethical but I guess that's what "maximizing profit" means for these merchants.

Yep, and so as a savvy consumer, I'm willing to modify referral URLs, construct false histories by sharing cookies or making cookies specifically to visit other sites which would lower my price, switch user agents out, and do quite a bit of other stuff which would take me only a few minutes to save possibly $50-100. My competition is the average consumer who will do none of this, so in the arms race, I can always be far ahead of I'm willing to invest some time to experiment and reverse-engineer the algorithms.

The Saving Game.

I've seen this with a local airline, but in their case I believe it's due to the relative scarcity of seats on a flight.

If I start the processing purchase, I can see prices go up in another tab. If I finish the process (purchasing the tickets at the original price, mind), then the prices stay up. If I bail out and wait ~10 minutes, they go back down again (10 minutes is the length of time your flights are reserved before being released again).

This fluctuation doesn't happen all the time; looking at the "book your seat" page, it seems to be correlated to the number of seats already booked and crossing some threshold.

All of which may not at all be applicable in your case, but I thought it was interesting (/sensible) :).

Throughout the booking process, they'll reserve the seats for you (so you don't get sniped while entering your details). This changes the number of available seats on the flight, which can push it over a threshold into the next pricing bracket.

Interesting awful business model idea: make lots of bots to click around flight reservation sites and hold seats to drive the prices for those seats up, then sell the seats your bots are holding for more than they're paying and less than the now-inflated price available to everyone else. I'm sure there's a name for this, not sure if it's legal.

EDIT: bonus round: screw with airline algorithmic pricing algorithms so hard that all their models get so screwed up that they end up ditching the idea. Victory for everyone except the airlines. Use the arbitrage profits to push this agenda. I'm sure you'd get sued out of existence long before it ever worked (unless e.g. It's open-source and ran by individuals), but it'd be hilarious. This is the kind of stuff I'd fund if I were rich.

Not sure I agree. Airplane seats are a scarce resource. The flipside of getting discounts for booking early, is paying more for booking late.

I don't think you can resell airline tickets unfortunately. Otherwise there would be companies buying up tickets months in advance, and then reselling them closer to the flight for a nice profit.

That's why you have to get your name exact, airlines now charge a lot for re-ticketing, the idea is to prevent this kind of arbitrage. In fact on long-haul travel if you misspell your name the airline will force you to create a new ticket completely and pay whatever the new price is plus a change fee (and you generally can't just cancel as there's often cancellation fees).

If you hold without ticketing you have a limited time period you can hold, furthermore if you hold and cancel above a certain threshold the airlines will get upset and effectively block you from their inventory.

You are on fire in this thread. Maybe it's time to learn to how to write browser extensions so that people can finally cause united as much pain as they cause their customers.

Do you remember how much was the price increase?

They know that people check a flight price then they go check hotels and other details for those days, then they come back to book the flight. People also check similar flights and those earlier or a bit later. They can see this pattern of a customer looking for the best deal.

By the time you've figured everything and made up you mind to book, they know that you want to buy. This is when they increase the price. when you actually try to book. I often get flight no longer available at that price. some sites i have to start over, some offer me an increased price.

here's a pattern i saw, for a flight to book 2 days ago:

$775 (initial price) -> $779 -> $832 -> $895.

This price ladder happened regardless of how i accessed the booking, ie through different websites. I decided i wasn't paying another 100 bucks and gave up.

24 hours (approx) later, i booked the same flight, through the same website for $785.

The whole thing could be just random, but i've had this sort of thing before.

There was a phenomenal study on that done last year (see: http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting...) by a group of Professors at Northeastern. Totally worth a read.

Here's their full paper: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf

Install in your browser disconnect (2?) and cookie cutter (I think that's the name - sorry, on cellphone). It's a completely different experience on the web. Your cookies are deleted every session and all ad/monitoring links are blocked.

Everyone thinks that this is the first time you visited their website.

"Self-Destructing Cookies" on Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

Is there an equivalent for chrome?

Edit - Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecg...

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