Do long-time users pay more for the same thing? On 1 March the Beijing Consumers Association published its survey on big-data price discrimination in internet consumption. More than eight in ten respondents said the practice is common or very common and reported experiencing it; experience testing found platforms where a new and an old account bought the same product or service at different effective prices.
The association commissioned the Beijing Sunshine Consumption Big Data Research Institute to run the study: a questionnaire open from 1 to 11 November 2021 that drew 4,186 valid responses, plus simulated purchase tests on 16 widely used e-commerce platforms, 32 test samples in all.
What the tests found
Of the 32 simulated purchases, 18 showed identical prices for new and old accounts and 14 did not — most explained by different discounts rather than different base prices. But some platforms did quote differently. On a travel app, an old account was shown a 360 yuan ticket with a 10 yuan voucher, paying 350; a new account was shown 355 with no voucher at all. On a food delivery platform, the old account received a smaller dual-subsidy voucher, 7 yuan less, and paid 0.4 yuan more in delivery fee than the new account.
In the questionnaire, 86.91% of respondents believed they had been discriminated against, 82.37% said the practice is widespread, and 92.33% attributed it to differentiated marketing powered by big data.
Where it happens and how
Online shopping was the worst reported, then online travel, food delivery and ride hailing: 82.44% reported it in online shopping, 76.85% in online travel, 66.96% in delivery and 63.00% in ride hailing.
The forms respondents recognised: the same product priced differently for different users at the same time; a price that climbs after repeated browsing; different discount structures for different users; coupons withheld from loyal customers; products and services targeted by user profile; and variants such as different prices by phone model, services pre-ticked from past purchases, or coupons offered when you leave and withdrawn when you buy.
The association recommends completing the relevant laws and strengthening personal information protection to give enforcement a basis, and innovating supervision: an online big-data monitoring platform, requiring operators to file their algorithms, data categories and data uses in advance, and real-time monitoring of listed prices to flag likely discrimination early.
For merchants, the lesson is simpler: charge the same customer the same price, and put the discount policy where everyone can see it.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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