At some point in the next 5 years, I predict there will online services that will "proxy-shop" for you. They will specialize in building profiles (cookies, logins, etc) that get offered low prices, then use these to purchase products on your behalf. Perhaps a browser plugin, so that at the moment you go to check out on a product, you send the product's link to the service and they get it for you at a lower price.
Then retailers will attempt to bring legal challenges against them for breaking terms of service, that will be interesting...
These services already exist, although I don’t believe they use the implementation you describe. Instead they’re basically coupon collectors. They just find the lowest available price and route you to it, or something like that. (I don’t use any of them, but they advertize to me relentlessly. I should probably try them out, actually.)
That's interesting. Are they actually using personalization to get better prices?
I'm thinking of scenarios where if two different browsers visit the same page, they'll get shown different prices depending on their cookies etc. In that case, a third-party site can't really "route you" to a lowest available price, they have to help you make the purchase from the right browser environment.
I have been thinking about that exact service for a while. One big issue is that you need the reverse engineer the pricing models of retailers, i.e. mapping out a high-dimensional space. For that you need a lot of data from the retailers. They could probably ban you quickly if you start pulling price quotes en masse. Then you need to invest a lot in cloaking techniques etc.
1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure;
2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops.
1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...
You must load the entire page and figure out where the attributes are in a smart way. You can do this today with headless chrome, in the old days with Selenium, etc.
... which brings us to 2. A mainstream, regionally-dominating shop, particularly any that adopt the marketplace model (Amazon, Taobao, etc.) may have as many as 20 million products. Given 2., good luck refreshing this price list in a sane time, even if you crack the attribute extraction.
If by some miraculous feat you solve these issues you now have to product match an inventory of billions of listings, most of which are misspelt, missing attributes (brand, etc.), and use photos that even a human could not match by sight. Think how hard it is to find exactly what you want on eBay...
The only way is to get the data directly from the retailers. Assuming they will give it to you, you end up with the same problem of feed poisoning that you have with marketing.
Oh one thing you could do: Create a huge community of users who share their purchase data and other data.and then build the model through that died so if you want to participate and save you need to be part of the panel
Funny, I had a lot of overlap in this kind of smart data quantizing when I was trying to build a venue page crawler that would intelligently mete out live music event dates, times and locations. I realized about 20% into the project I'd need some form of machine learning and then bailed.
You’re over-thinking it, I think. All you need to do is provide a service that makes the E-commerce website think you’re not a big spender: geo: live in a poorer neighborhood, and age/gender/preferences must be the most optimal for you not them. Each experience (as they call it was pre-defined and pre-build).
Except it's not necessarily that simple. They are also probably taking into account your ability to seek out other options.
Researchers found that black women were getting cars sold to them at a much higher markup than white men. I doubt that is because they were getting profiled as wealthier.
We can have TensorFlow do it...one model to rule them all...there will be neural networks fitting retailers, then there will be adversarial networks deployed by retailers, then NCMs (network counter measure)... the price will be high, since more and more will be consumed by the networks, then as an emergent behavior Skynet will rise and it will launch the missiles...
Ha. No, the big difference here is the deception factor. Using online retailers' personalization against them.
A "meatspace" analogue from 50 years ago would be wearing a disguise to avoid discrimination, for example a woman dressing up in a coat/hat/fake mustache to avoid getting ripped off at the car dealership.
Travel agents were never on the side of the consumer. If you asked travel agents who they perceived they were working for, they'd tell you it's the airlines. This is not just my opinion; in travel industry magazines, articles, etc., this definitely was their stance. They'd choose flights for you that were most profitable for themselves and/or the airlines (and those two factors coincide nicely). Even pre-web, I almost always found a better prices by phoning the airlines directly if I wanted to spend the time.
I was explaining travel agents to my kid the other day. The service of the agent was more than just booking you a flight, you were paying for their knowledge and experience with traveling in particular regions.
Resources like Zagat were helpful but could only get you so far.
In pre internet days if you were flying to far away places like India or Vietnam where your local airline didn't offer service, you would have no resources available for finding or arranging flights, hotels, or other transport. That's where a travel agent was helpful.
To be fair, the bread and butter for most travel agents was booking flights, cruises, and tour packages. Which is why the corner travel agent isn’t around any longer for the most part. Yes, some were more knowledgeable. My parents used a couple of them over the years.
These types of travel agents still exist but they’re generally specialty travel, adventure travel, etc. companies that handle a combination of group trips with guides and private trips with or without guides. Besides the big global ones there are many that concentrate regionally and/or in a particular type of activity.
In UK in the past we got better deals from the local travel agent than you could book direct from the suppliers. That's going back quite a long way however.
When travel agents were local shops, like a local boutique clothing shop, it would seem they had a lot to lose and not that much to gain by working against their customers interests.
Morally it seems fair. But like most things in our system, I'm sure it will end up being rigged legally in the big guy's favor.
Look at our system now. Big capital can move their tax headquarters to Ireland, its service center to India, its manufacturing to China. Hell, they can now even import low wage workers to the EU and US on visas if it will give them an advantage.
But good luck to any consumer trying to buy products at the same prices sold in these same places (e.g. pharmaceuticals). Even digital goods like games, music, and movies are priced differently, but consumers can never take advantage of currency arbitrage as companies ban VPNs, track IPs, restrict payments by the address of credit cards, etc.
>"Morally it seems fair. But like most things in our system, I'm sure it will end up being rigged legally in the big guy's favor"
Indeed, corporations are now considered people in the US, which more or allows allows then legislate away any perceive threats to the rigged system.[1]
Good argument - they 'geo-shift' to reduce their costs on the one hand, and make sure we can't decrease our costs on the other hand. Pretty unfair taking advantage of the system like that.
I've always wondered why it's not possible to get insider info from purchasing depts on factory details so we're not simply paying for over inflated brands to line corporate pockets.
The first thing retailers will probably try is simply modifying their terms of service. I'm not sure what argument they'll come up with there.
An analogy I'm thinking of is, imagine the website has a box that asks you to input your age, then it shows you your price. If you put in a number over 40, the price will be higher. Now you can just put in a number under 40 and get a lower price, but their response would be to make it against their terms of service to "lie" about your age.
Similarly, they will equate using "someone else's cookies" to lying and claim it is morally wrong and illegal and against their TOS. Even though what they're doing is discrimination.
I wonder if there would be a case where the technology is patented. Then some startup is acquired and the same consortium ends up owning both the tech to dynamically price and the tech to dynamically purchase..
why have something/someone purchase for you on your behalf when you can browse through aggregators to find what you like?
For instance, there's shopittome. I'd much prefer to select from a list of offerings and sources rather than pay premium for someone/something placing the order and then having to navigate obstacles to return (where accepted) if the item is ill fit.
Not just limited to fashion here... electronics, tickets for inconvenient travel time, food, etc.
How do you like shopittome btw? We're working on a similar service for higher end fashion, but aim to be more personalized with product types, colors, styles..etc:
Then retailers will attempt to bring legal challenges against them for breaking terms of service, that will be interesting...