Ebay Differential Pricing

So we haven't been able to use our Q10s to do an awful lot on eBay for an awfully long time; but I still have use for it.

A new one on me today, and web searching didn't yield any clues.

Logged in on desktop, go to item in eBay*, login to buy. One price is displayed.

Q10 left logged-in. Go to item*. A different price is displayed.

Double-check by comparing forecast delivery date and seller's feedback scores that there's no cacheing going-on. No. Both pages are apparently "live", though different Quantity On Hand is displayed (I'm sure it's fake anyway) and Q10 displays a multi-buy discount.

The better price is on the Q10 but, frustratingly, checkout hangs at (guessing) a canvas id check that isn't supported by the ageing browser.

Differential pricing isn't new and isn't illegal of course, just a bit sneaky in the "Ripoff Britain" sense. Am I the last person to wake-up to the fact that eBay has been doing this for whatever period of time?

[Both desktop and Q10 are looking at the same national site (.co.uk)]

Originally Posted by mj162

So we haven't been able to use our Q10s to do an awful lot on eBay for an awfully long time; but I still have use for it.

A new one on me today, and web searching didn't yield any clues.

Logged in on desktop, go to item in eBay*, login to buy. One price is displayed.

Q10 left logged-in. Go to item*. A different price is displayed.

Double-check by comparing forecast delivery date and seller's feedback scores that there's no cacheing going-on. No. Both pages are apparently "live", though different Quantity On Hand is displayed (I'm sure it's fake anyway) and Q10 displays a multi-buy discount.

The better price is on the Q10 but, frustratingly, checkout hangs at (guessing) a canvas id check that isn't supported by the ageing browser.

Differential pricing isn't new and isn't illegal of course, just a bit sneaky in the "Ripoff Britain" sense. Am I the last person to wake-up to the fact that eBay has been doing this for whatever period of time?

[Both desktop and Q10 are looking at the same national site (.co.uk)]

Not just eBay also can be found on Amazon for certain but I’m sure others will provide more examples.

So commercially how does it work then?

Algorithms using collected data ?

So commercially how does it work then?

eBay has been experimenting with grouping different listings together. Like most things eBay does, sellers hate it. But that might be what you're seeing.

Originally Posted by mj162

So commercially how does it work then?

Depending on the algorithms, you see products offered for a certain price. From everything I’ve seen, the sites don’t “advertise” this happens and keep the proprietary algorithms “secret” if we’re discussing the same thing. Amazon has been doing this for at least a few years with it’s own listings.

By commercially, I mean: If the seller sets a price of £10 and one sees it advertised for £9 and another for £11, how does it work?

Originally Posted by mj162

By commercially, I mean: If the seller sets a price of £10 and one sees it advertised for £9 and another for £11, how does it work?

The different prices are either from different sellers, or the buyer is being offered a price from that seller that is different to what is offered to other buyers from that seller based on the other data.

It’s like when a merchant offers the same product to different customers at different prices thinking one person will choose to pay more or can afford to pay more. Not everyone gets treated equally. It’s variable pricing. Like Wawa gas stations, price is x and down the road price is x-1 or x+1 for whatever the location can support.

Originally Posted by Chuck Finley69

The different prices are either from different sellers, or the buyer is being offered a price from that seller that is different to what is offered to other buyers from that seller based on the other data.

It’s like when a merchant offers the same product to different customers at different prices thinking one person will choose to pay more or can afford to pay more. Not everyone gets treated equally. It’s variable pricing. Like Wawa gas stations, price is x and down the road price is x-1 or x+1 for whatever the location can support.

The seller sets the price and has no option to change the price to different buyers, except on different sites (ebay.co.uk, eBay.com.au, etc.).

Originally Posted by mj162

By commercially, I mean: If the seller sets a price of £10 and one sees it advertised for £9 and another for £11, how does it work?

I'm trying to understand your question, because I think I may have the answer.

Are you asking why this is an advantage to the seller economically?

I don't know about eBay, because I hardly use it. But Amazon does this (variable pricing) and for good reason...

Originally Posted by whatnow00

The seller sets the price and has no option to change the price to different buyers, except on different sites (ebay.co.uk, eBay.com.au, etc.).

I’m referring to eBay acting like the retailer controlling what buyers are seeing and not showing all the sellers.

Originally Posted by Chuck Finley69

I’m referring to eBay acting like the retailer controlling what buyers are seeing and not showing all the sellers.

That can happen if you arrive at eBay from Google Shopping, but all you have to do is search for something and then sort by price.

So, no real understanding of how it works commercially.

I have my doubts that they even do it. [Obviously I know what I saw with my own eyes].

I spoke with 3 agents at eBay. None of them had a clue what I was talking about. As a test, I asked one agent to read out the price they saw for an item. The agent did so without hesitation. That was almost enough in itself.

My Q10 started issuing captcha challenges (left logged into eBay). They failed, possibly because none of the installed browsers support HTML5 Canvas. I decided to log-out and back in again. Wouldn't accept my password. Used the lost password facility. On one screen it offered to text a code to the phone number registered on the account.

The telephone number that was displayed was not my number and appeared (from the pattern of dashes and "x"s) to be a US number.

Then I tried the lost password option to send a link to the email address registered with the account.

The email address, even though partly redacted, was nothing like my email address.

UK CS had closed, I made international call. I made two other calls and held for over an hour into the early hours of the morning waiting for eBay Fraud to pick-up and take my report about a suspected account hijack.

Agent confirmed that there was no suspicious activity on the account and that the phone number and email were unchanged.

Now my Q10, when using the browser, regularly complains about there being not enough storage. For years, I'd pressed the action to continue without saving on the belief that all that was happening is that size of the database the browser uses for cache, cookies etc., couldn't be extended (so was presumably being reused).

The page I had been looking at before I logged-out (and couldn't log back in) wasn't cached -- I had never looked at that item before. Moreover the delivery date was the same future date as the delivery date viewing that same item on my desktop.

I don't know what the fault mode was for eBay to partially disclose another user's phone number and email but I suspect it to account for why the pricing (and promotional discounts) were distinctly different on my Q10 versus my desktop.

No doubt I could research how eBay's time-limited discounts work commercially.

I'm now doubting that eBay does do differential pricing and that what was happening was that the listing page was being served with some attribute set to some value that rendered the page showing 5%, 10%, 15% volume discounts (while the desktop did not (or vice versa, I forget now), and another attribute set to some value that rendered the page showing a time-limited discount of X% until Y time.

This was the most extreme case, but TBH, I have seen "funnies" like that before: If on the browser you see the preferential price, you then proceed to checkout, right at the very last stage in the flow it renders a different (the "true") price. All entirely conjecture on my part. However it is clear that you can view the same item on eBay on (I won't generalise) a Q10 and see different pricing than you see on a desktop. There is some interaction (that I don't understand) with the browser. As you know, it's nearly impossible to use a Q10 to complete a purchase on eBay for all the "You're using an unsupported browser" immovable overlays.