Price adjusting?

[Helevitia]

I heard on the news this morning that companies are using cookies to determine if you have been to a competitors site and what price you might be willing to pay for something and then adjusting their price accordingly? It wasn't called price adjusting and I can't seem to find anything about it on the net.

Anybody heard of this and what do you know?

[KvHagedorn]

Sounds like a silly rumor to me. Attention to the buying public: electronics retailers, especially those online, don't usually make a whole lot of profit.. and what they do make is eaten up by operating expenses. I talked to some ditzy doctor's wife today who thought we would make big money selling dvds, thinking we must pay a couple of dollars for them and would sell them at $15 or so..

[Wombat]

Dave, I can't see quite how that would work. A site can only request cookies that it gave to you. It only knows where you've been previously if you follow a link, and reply to a referrer inquiry.

The way companies could do this though is if they happen to use the same advertisers. If site A and site B both have ads from the same site, then the advertiser might sell them the statistics.

That said, some sites definitely have price X listed, but you can get less then X if you follow a link from pricewatch or something.

[KvHagedorn]

Pricewatch links? Yeah that much is true..

[KeiFront]

It happens, this link was posted on a dutch newssite yesterday about price adjusting: http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/ "Seventeen Facts American Shoppers Need to Know - But Don't "

[Brian Ellis]

There is zero security in cookies. It is not difficult to spoof a cookie into thinking it's being interrogated legitimately, provided you know the coding your competitor is using. As it is very low level encryption, a good hacker will break the code in half-an-hour by examining the cookie-originator's software. I haven't heard of this happening, but it's plausible.

[Wombat]

The browser should not be handing over cookies for somewhere other than the requesting site.

[schmosef]

I seem to recall the IE, it one of it's more recent versions started enforcing this properly and showing a warning in the bottom right corner that it blocked access to cookies that where not from the site you are visiting.

Still, what Brian says is right. There must be clandestine ways that a site can at least detect what other site's cookies you have on your machine.

[Elie]

LOL, find the cookie, and modify the price, drop it 50% and then go else where for a price

Cheers,
Elie

[schmosef]

More difficult than you'd think. Browsers are designed to destroy cookies if they detect that they've been used by any other app.

I'm sure that there's a way...

[Brian Ellis]

I seem to recall the IE, it one of it's more recent versions started enforcing this properly and showing a warning in the bottom right corner that it blocked access to cookies that where not from the site you are visiting.

Still, what Brian says is right. There must be clandestine ways that a site can at least detect what other site's cookies you have on your machine.

Dammit. It's easy enough to spoof sites, spammers do it all the time.

[Wombat]

Dammit. It's easy enough to spoof sites, spammers do it all the time.

No, spammers do it an entirely different way. They make it look like the spoofed site to the human at the keyboard, but the computer isn't fooled.