If you enjoy online shopping (and who doesn’t?), you need to hear this news. A study of the most popular e-commerce websites done by computer scientists at Northeastern University found that price steering and discriminatory pricing is more widespread than any of us thought.
Since you might be a little confused about what this all means, let’s define our terms. Price discrimination happens when a company charges consumers more for a product when purchased online or from a certain device. Price steering happens when a consumer is directed towards expensive products when, based on his or her needs, is more fancy than necessary. The study done was adjusted for legitimate discrepancies in pricing, like location. That being said, six out of sixteen popular e-commerce sites engaged in these practices.
Some of the biggest offenders for price discrimination were travel-booking sites like Orbitz or Cheaptickets, where potential customers are routinely charged $12 more per night if they don’t have accounts with the sites. Even worse is Travelocity’s $15 increase for users of mobile operating systems other than iOS. (That’s you, dear reader.) Orbitz is considered a repeat offender, since in 2012 it was caught charging Mac users up to 30% more than PC users for their services.
Other sites like Home Depot, Expedia, and Hotels.com were directing users to products that are pricier than the consumer needs. Home Depot was found to be showing mobile-device users products $100 more than those shown to desktop users.
The issue with these discriminatory pricing and price steering practices is that they are not telling users about these practices, and taking advantage of a customer’s ignorance to earn an extra buck at mobile shoppers’ expense. Hopefully, the work done by the folks at Northeastern University will inspire some change in these business practices, or at least promote some transparency. Now that the public knows a little more about the issue, maybe we can try to convince companies like Orbitz or Travelocity to change the way they work on mobile to create a fairer, more enjoyable online shopping experience.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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