Effective pricing by retailers escalates

As the Christmas season approaches, many retailers are taking advantage of the occasion by personalizing prices instead of having normal price changes and this is destroying the trust of customers.

In the past it was most common to leading League Baseball and airlines but in recent times, retailers are also taking up the same practice. Simply put, price personalization implies that the prices of products can be changes at any given time with no genuine reason but in most cases they are determined by the demand and supply level in addition to other factors which might include postal codes.

Jenn Markey, a spokesperson for 360pi, which accumulates and evaluates pricing information for retailers and

Brand manufacturers explained that retailers are very good at mimicking the trends of other sectors. She went on to stress that quite recently in the electronics sector on Amazon, customers saw a change in prices eight top nine time in a day.

And this practice is now becoming a norm as prices changes are occurring at an increasing rate.

However aggressive price changes are not a surprise to many, as for many years now, this has been ongoing as retailers change their prices based on sales and flyers. With modern technology on the increase, price changes has increased immensely with the reasons behind the changes, also on the increase.

The issue of the price changes was raised up by Uber when it initiated an extra charge for booking a ride during peak times.

As a result of the rapid price changes, sears Canada declared that it will re-examine the prices of vital appliances and mattresses this summer on a daily basis to ensure that customers get to have affordable prices, and also making plans to expand it on other products.

Nevertheless, most of the aggressive price changes occur online as they can easily change prices as opposed to large stores that will have to change prices by hand even though they have electronic shelving products at their disposal, it is not such a common practice in Canada.

According to experts, aggressive price changes lands retailers great profits, but it is a practice that destroys the trust of customers as it’s not a pleasing situation for customers to be aware that they have paid for a product because of their postal code, or because they make use of certain electronics, are considered as wealthy.

Markey also added that there is proof to such scenarios.

Technology has reached to an extent at which retailers can determine the buying ability of customer, and this in most cases makes retailers to differentiate between customers.

Coca-Cola is one company that got a bitter experience for such practice, as in the past they had tried to introduce a machine that would determine the price of serving Coke based on the current weather condition. The hotter the weather, the higher the price will be, but this did not go down well with customers.

Christo Wilson, an assistant professor and researcher in the College of Computer and Information Science, at Northeastern University, stated that in a survey he recently conducted, he observed that some retailers offered varied prices to customers that make use of either a desktop computer, or a mobile device and android users were given higher prices.

This brought a negative reaction from customers as they claimed that there was no clarity online as one could ever tell if all customers were being offered the same price.