Source: http://trend-forward.blogspot.com/2011/06/panic-confusion-in-retail.html

The retail industry is changing more than ever before. E-commerce has disrupted the brick-and-mortar format we’ve used for hundreds of years. Consumers have more options than ever before and will only spend their money on the very best option. To keep up, retailers need to be vigilant across channels and give customers many options for purchasing products. They also need to engage with customers through social media. 

Found on Neil Perkin’s Only Dead Fish: “There was something of a kerfuffle recently when it became public knowledge that travel website Orbitz were recommending different price ranges of hotels based on the user’s operating system. Data mining had told them that Mac users typically pay a premium of upto 30% on a night’s stay so they were using data to improve content recommendation, and in the process their chances of selling products at premium prices.

Dynamic personalisation of content based on data is nothing new of-course. Amazon does it all the time, generating highly customised pages that pull on your purchase history and other data making it highly unlikely that any two of Amazon’s millions of customers will see the same home page when they’re logged in (a remarkable thing, if you stop to think about it). Systems that optimise decision-making around merchandising and pricing by modelling the result of individual discounts or promotional changes are also not new. 

But whilst Orbitz may not have been showing different prices for the same goods to different customers, it seems that a growing…read on.”