Amazon.com Price Discrimination--Class Discussion
Amazon.com is under a lot of fire for using price discrimination with its new users. It has been accused of offering lower prices for it's products to customers who are new to the site. This "trick" was found out when long-time and loyal customers erased their third-party cookies and went to amazon.com to find that they were offered lower prices for, say, DVD's than they were a few minutes earlier when amazon had known they were not new customers.
Do I think this is terrible? No. Do I think this is deceiving? Sort of. Will Amazon get in trouble? No. Did this work for Amazon? Probably. Should Amazon been for upfront about what they were doing: No, because if they did it wouldn't have worked because everyone would be erasing their third-party cookies every time they went to buy something from Amazon.com and therefor defeat the whole purpose of the promotion.
1 comment:
I completely agree with your assessment of Amazon's pricing "experiment." I don't think Amazon did anything different than merchants selling products on the street. I think most people would be surprised that you can haggle prices almost anywhere.
Post a Comment