Price customisation on your website
Depending on who you are and how you browse may well depend on the price you pay for goods and services online.
Price customisation software - based around the concept of behavioural targeting - allows a website to decide whether you have money or not and whether you're determined to buy, or perhaps need a little prodding.
The technology can work in two ways.
The first is based on off-website characteristics.
What is your location, what sort of websites have you been looking at and what is your age. According to an article I read a few weeks back in The Economist, Mac users are wealthier than Windows users and so that can be taken into account as well.
The second is based on your behavior on the website itself.
For instance, if you're mowing through the cart, the technology can assume that you se there to buy and so the need to offer you a coupon or free shipping is lessened.
Conversely, if you're frigging around and not moving towards the end-goal, you might be offered a discount. This works especially well for services such as insurance and travel where a user expects the price to be dynamic and invariable, versus say a TV or a car.
There are wide degrees of sophistication in behavioural targeting and implementing an effective and sustainable program is a big deal. The technology is expensive and you need to know what you're doing.
Start with the basics. When a user fills in a form, grab some data that might help you sell more accurately to them: what was their nouns keyword, what pages did they look at, have they been to your website before.
Build up and start to customise and personalise offers based on products or services they have previously looked at on your website.
Once you see the benefits and have a handle on the basic ropes, then would be the time to start looking at the really clever technologies... Where you can set your price based on whether you like their look or not.
Clever stuff.
