Sep 6, 2012

Online Retailers Changing Product Prices By The Minute

Posted by Wendy Weber

In a Wall Street Journal piece entitled, “Don’t Like This Price?  Wait a Minute”, Julia Angwin and Dana Mattioli explain that retailers are deploying a new generation of algorithms to change the price of products from toilet paper to bicycles on an hour-by-hour and sometimes minute-by-minute basis.

Apparently the most frequent price adjustments are occurring among web stores selling products on Amazon and eBay Inc.

Similar to the airline model, in which the price for a seat changes constantly, online retailers are vying to maintain the lowest price – even if only by a penny – so that their products will show up at the top of search results by shoppers conducting price comparisons.

“In the age of the Internet, fixed prices are a thing of the past,” said Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the University of Washington and co-founder and chief technologist at Decide.com.

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.

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