Why you should avoid buying online...

Yesterday was a quite a busy day. It wasn't as busy as I expected though cos my presentation time as pushed back, really back, to around 6 pm, which means I could have gone back to NTU to take my own sweet time to register my subjects. Well, on the bright side, I managed to get all the subjects I wanted. I think I really have to praise the people involved in the STARS planner as it really made registration a pleasure compared with the previous system.

Today's article is also related to an online system, the online purchasing system. If you have ever bought anything online, or even shopped online, then you'd probably interacted with that online system. Now, most of us would probably think that online merchants will tend to give us lower prices, as their overheads are lower. But is this true?

Well, the fact of the matter is that it is totally false. Online merchants have every right to charge any price they wish, and worst of all, they have technology to help them. While prices in actual stores are fixed by the price tag, electronic price tags can be changed easily, very easily. So easily that many "reputable" online shops have decided to implement a system that displayes different prices to different customers, based on their shopping history or what sites they've recently visited. They call this "price customization."

Some examples of this "price customization" system in use include a photography website that charges different prices for cameras and related equipment depending on whether the customer has recently visited popular price comparison websites. A more famous example concerns the online giant Amazon.com, where one buyer found that after deleting the electronic tags on his computer that identified him as a regular customer, the price of a DVD changed from $26.24 to $22.74.

The worst part of it all - it's legal.

Willi Stabenau, an online shopper, said he shops online frequently but always remembers: "They're after your money, and you want to spend as little as possible."

"People are fooling themselves if they believe otherwise," Stabenau said.

This is all part of a survey conducted in the USA, which found that more than two-thirds of people in America didn't that know it was legal to charge different prices and thought that online merchants always provided the lowest prices.

So I guess that probably is another blow to the rise of online shopping. Personally, I still prefer the good old shop where I can walk up and touch the stuff I want to buy, ask the salesperson for his/her opinion, and then walk out of shop with the product and a guarantee card in hand. And I don't know about you, but I think I will be avoiding buying online for a long time to come...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Most American consumers don't realize Internet merchants and even traditional retailers sometimes charge different prices to different customers for the same products, according to a new survey.

The study, "Open to Exploitation,'' found nearly two-thirds of adult Internet users believed incorrectly it was illegal to charge different people different prices, a practice retailers call "price customization.'' More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said they believed online travel sites are required by law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.

The study, expected to be released Wednesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, is the latest to cast doubt on the notion of sophisticated consumers in the digital age.

Click here for the full article.