So, let’s get started with Yahoo shopping website.  A link to it is http://shopping.yahoo.com. Their main page is very cluttered. Although, most shopping websites have online ads, there a too many in case of yahoo.

Their search engine is powerful. I started searching for an “iPad”, and it was able to give me a precise result in the first row.

Product page gives a product description and a list of sellers.

But if you click on any of the seller or buy now link it goes to the PriceGrabber‘s website.

Do you think that the main page itself should be forwarded to PriceGrabber?

That completes a macroscopic review on Yahoo’s shoppping website. Happy reading, and do not forget to post comments.

I am going to walk you over Shopping.com website.

The website has a rich interface. You can see the categories with mouse rollover.

They have listed categories at two places on the front page. First on the menu bar, and then popular tags in the left.

The product page has product description, list of sellers with selling prices, review, and compare prices.

If you click on seller, you can read reviews about sellers. Do you think their page is descriptive enough about seller?

The biggest cons of Shopping.com is that their interface is very rich.  Sometime it can be distraction for users.

I hope you will enjoy shopping on Shopping.com. Happy shopping.

Bizrate.com is also operated by Shopzilla, Inc. But Bizrate.com has very different look and feel.

The shopping experience on Shopzilla is great. I clicked on Women’s Jacket and Coats, and I got the following results.

I was also able to see a review on a merchant.

Shopping on Shopzilla is fun.  I hope you can use their price comparison engine.

I hope you would be able to use their website for price comparison and shopping.  In the website review series, I am also going to review Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, etc.  So keep reading, and do not forget to post comments.

I like the way they categorize products in simple categories:

I talked to Street Prices public relations department. The public relation department told me, that Street Prices was the first website to set upprice graphs in 1998.  They also told me that users can create accounts and set up price alerts.

They also list eBay and Craigslist items in the used item category. If you want to see how easy it is to compare prices on Street Prices, click on this link.

You can follow their tweets @howmuchis.  Their main office is in Santa Clara. Street Prices has reported sales of a little less than a million. Try their website by yourself and let me know what you think about it. I hope you will be able to use their website for price comparison and shopping.  I am planning a series of website reviews, including Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, PriceGrabber.com, and others.

Happy reading.

On internet it’s kind of hard for sellers to understand who is buying. For better or worse, the technology is not mature enough to identify people at face value, so merchants end up giving hefty discounts. They hope to collect personal information to label you for future sales.

An online price matching engines takes all those deals, compares them using sophisticated technology and algorithms, and presents you facts and figures. On top of that, you can also read reviews. Sellers around the globe try to sell items based on their speculations of pricing. Although they may track your previous online purchases, it’s hard for them to implement third degree price discrimination based on the face value. And foremost they have to be competitive because their business is online. Keep in mind that second degree price discrimination or volume discount can easily be implemented online.

How do you see technology impacting shopping? Leave your comments on this post using the form.

In a nutshell, the price comparison engine collects discounts available from various merchants and displays them in a list. You can then compare and make an educated choice. Keep in mind, online tools can only provide you facts and figures. It’s your job make a right choice.

With that said, I hope you enjoy my postings.

I was scheduled to talk about using technology for your advantage, or what shopping tools can do for you, but it looks like that we need to discuss pricing in detail to understand the entire game better. So I want to continue discussing price discrimination and discounts.

Today, I went to the Olympic Club in San Francisco. I heard it is a good fitness center, and I was interested in a new membership. They told me their members list includes Michael Jackson and Madonna. They told me that I need references from five existing members along with a $10,000 entry fee for a new membership. Do you know how many people were given memberships without references and how much they end up paying? If they let members join without references for a higher price that would be an example of third degree price discrimination.

The challenge with third degree price discrimination is that this type of discrimination is  harder for a layman to find. Usually, when you get a coupon, you are happy that you are better off than your neighbor. But you are a loser 9 out of 10 times. Does that sound funny? Let’s look at that in detail.

Usually, marketers, people helping sellers,  may divide a market into segments. For example, 10 segments would be an appropriate number. In this case, you will belong to one of those segments. They created segments to sell items at different prices. Theoretically, marketers will have 10 different discounts for 10 different segments. Now if you get a deal once in a while through your affiliation with some group, you lost 9 other deals.

Can you tell me some examples of hidden price secret?

So what happens on the internet? Marketers are confused on the internet. They don’t know who is visiting their websites and they end up giving their discounts to everyone. So they collect hefty amount of data to explore the buyers’ identities. Sites like doubleclick track your browsing patterns across websites. You might be worried about your Facebook and Google pages, but marketers have all your information.

To get good deals you must be an educated buyer, and should understand how sellers are trying to sell you goods. For example Last week, my mom got a cell phone with SMS capability. When she texted me, I was scared of replying because of charges on my bill. So I called my cell phone carrier’s customer service. They told me that I have been paying for an SMS package for last couple of years. How funny is that! I am paying for SMS services that I never use! That is salesmanship, as a salesman was able to sell me a feature that I didn’t plan to use. Although a couple of cents every month doesn’t sound like a big deal, the cell phone companies don’t want to lose a couple of cents on my bill.

I hope you understand more about pricing. Happy reading

Price discrimination has been divided in three major categories. For now, I will focus on third degree discrimination.  Third degree price discrimination is a special kind of discrimination, where target buyers are divided into groups, so sellers can sell items at different prices.  Group parameters may include age, gender, income group, working status, etc.  There might be other parameters that are harder to identify like religion, because it is a hidden, sensitive, or cultural issue parameter.

Classical examples include student and senior citizens discount for movie tickets. Higher dry cleaning charges for women’s shirts would be a similar example.  A hard to understand example would be charging the same life insurance premium for both genders even though women live longer.. If you ask for life insurance quotes, most times, life insurance companies provide the same premiums for the same benefits.  However, women have higher life expectancy. So mathematically, they end up paying more for the same services.

It’s easier to implement country based price discrimination based on geographical location.  I have already talked about how you can find a cheaper version of a textbook on amazon.co.uk than amazon.com. It’s hard to implement country based price discrimination in the same geographical market.  Critics have said that different immigration policies for people from different countries is an implementation of third degree price discrimination in the same market, i.e. for the people living in same geographical region.

Let’s also discuss implementing price discrimination based upon religion. Price discrimination is often implemented as a discount.  Discounts are special pricing given to buyers based on predefined conditions. These conditions might be coupons, sales, buying medium, quantities, etc.If you get a discount coupon at a church of a specific denomination, that would be an example of religion based third degree price discrimination.

As a part of my ongoing research, I am trying to figure out answers to two more questions:

• Is a local currency also a form of third degree price discrimination? ^{[List of Local Currencies in the USA][Bernal Bucks in the Bay Area]}
• Can examples of 10% less salary for women, 15% less salary for men of color, and 30% less salary for an immigrant, for the same work, be called as examples of third degree price discrimination? (Assuming time is money).^{[Equal Pay for Equal Work: Everyone's Entitled][Despite New Law, Gender Salary Gap Persists][Why Some Women Skirt the Wage Gap][Congress Must Act to Close the Wage Gap for Women: Facts on Women's Wages and Pending Legislation][Reverse Brain Drain]}

Because of the complexities of these issues, I will discuss these topics some time later.

What do you think about hidden group based pricing? Does it help you? Do you have a model that gives the upper edge to a specific group all the time? You can post your comments below.

The biggest challenge for sellers, who are implementing third degree price discrimination is identifing what the target group will pay.

Some good discussions of  third degree price discrimination would be Third-Degree Price Discrimination with Buyer Power, Price Discrimination on Economics Help, and An article on price discrimination on Wikipedia.

Well this finishes out my brief discussion of third degree price discrimination.  Tomorrow, I will discuss what shopping tools can do for you.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog posts.  Happy reading.

By definition, a product is a collection of attributes. Some of the attributes can be functional and some non-functional (simply aesthetic).

Let’s talk about a car.  A car has many functions, like transporting a person from point A to point B.  It also has functional attributes of safety, environment control, space, number of passenger seats, etc.  Sometimes attributes might be paradoxical, like upscale merchandise from Walmart, fuel efficient sports carcar, etc. ^{[Report Examines How Consumers View Products With Unlikely Attribute Combinations]}

So why am I writing about attributes and price matching?  In fact, the matched products may have different attributes, and theoretically they would be different products in that case.  A market survey found that the most weighted attributes in car trades are color and door noise.  Both of those have nothing to do with functional attributes of a car like safety and ease of transportation.

So, you need to find out what has been compared, and what needs to compared for your needs. It means apples need to be compared with apples only. What attributes would you prefer when you are buying a car? You can post your comments below.

This completes a brief discussion about Products, Attributes, and Attribute Preferences.  Happy reading.

Branding is the identity of a commodity, product, or good. It is the way people know your merchandise.  Usually a brand is associated associatedbig names, but a brand may be created in a local market. The biggest challenge is not creating and marketing a brand but maintaining it.  A brand is a symbol that reminds buyers about the product.  It may also include a name, logo, or slogan. Usually, simple images for logos are preferred.  But there are examples of logos using many colors like in Nike, Starbukcs, etc.  The major functionality of a brand is creating loyalty, trust, credibility, emotional response, message, and most importantly motivation to buy.  There might be some advantages to using big established brands, like quality, trust, and social creditability.

So, why am I talking about branding with price comparison engines? Branding supersedes the functionality of the product, and buyers end up buying a wrong product, or paying too much. Price comparison engines can be used to separate similar perceived products based on their functionality and attributes. You can get knowledge of the product functions based on comparative studies and reviews. Reviews can expose myth of quality and trust linked with branding. If you don’t read reviews, you can end up buying a product only for social creditability, even though the product doesn’t you’re your functional expectations. Price comparison engines can be used to set expectations superseding branding.

Remember, sellers want to sell products at the highest price.  Profit is their food money.  They do their best to create brands and emotional responses, but you can use price matching engines and focus on product functionality.  Other places to read about branding includeAll About Branding and Brand Week. So my question to you would be, are you always driven by branding?

This completes the topic of branding in a nutshell.  Tomorrow, I will talk about how to use price comparison engines to get over it. Tomorrow, I will talk about products and attributes.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog.  And finally, do not forget to post comments. Happy shopping.

In a nutshell, price discrimination lets you sell an identical good or service to different users at different prices.  Most markets let sellers discriminate to increase competition. Sellers want buyers to pay as much as they can. The buyer’s ability to pay different prices is called elasticity of demand.

Sellers implement price discrimination by various methods.  Sometimes they categorize buyers based up on age, time, and location. Sometimes they let buyers choose their own category.  Sometimes buyers may have to negotiate individually. Used car sales are a good example of a market where different buyers end up paying different prices.  In the case of price comparison engines, we try to find the best price for a desirable product by aggregating results.  Price comparison engines aggregate millions of deals across a vast geographical area. Different products have different geographic ranges.  For example cellphones vs books have different markets spans. Cell phones use different technologies in different countries, but text books may have same contents across different continents. Sometimes you end up paying less for a text book when it is shipped from UK (including shipping)!

Do you think this price model is amazing?  To understand price discrimination better, a couple of good points to start may be Price Discrimination on Wikipedia and Marketing engineering: computer-assisted marketing analysis and planning on Google Books.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog.  Tomorrow, I will talk about branding and attribute preferences.   And yeah, do not forget to post a comment.  Your feedback is valuable