Does This Happen to You With Online Buying?

[Jim Koepke]

It seems after buying something online some companies bombard my email with deals on the item just purchased. This has made me think with one vendor that is often used to buy my preferred pants maybe an order for one pair should be put in to see if they offer a deal that makes it worthwhile to then order my usual five pair of pants.

Today one of the sites that has been used to buy equipment for our greenhouse sent me a special offer on DeWalt cordless tools. One of the things about this vendor is they do not send daily emails. That is something that is appreciated. So a little bit of perusing of their site and offer seemed in order. Lately some of my time has been spent at their site to keep an eye on a particular item. There was also a quick survey taken on site.

Imagine my surprise when a couple hours later there was an email from them saying they noticed me poking around on their site and were offering me a limited time discount code for 15% off an order made within the limited time.

Nice saving thirty bucks and shipping included for something needed for the greenhouse.

jtk

[Jim Becker]

'Cart retention' and other methods are becoming more common with online sellers to help folks who browse to also ultimately buy. Offering a promotional discount to someone that was already shopping them is a lot more productive than offering one "to the world" in many cases. One thing I try to take advantage of when I can is "stacking" EBates/Rakuten along with seller discounts and CC points to the best of my ability. Sometimes, it's only a little bit, but sometimes it can be an eye opening discount, especially when the items are already on sale. With some of my favorite vendors, I only buy on sale with additional discounts and free shipping all at the same time...never at full price.

You want to really go crazy...Kohls. Rakuten, daily extra discounts, money from previous purchases, sale items, local pickup to avoid shipping, etc....LOL

[Doug Dawson]

'Cart retention' and other methods are becoming more common with online sellers to help folks who browse to also ultimately buy. Offering a promotional discount to someone that was already shopping them is a lot more productive than offering one "to the world" in many cases. One thing I try to take advantage of when I can is "stacking" EBates/Rakuten along with seller discounts and CC points to the best of my ability. Sometimes, it's only a little bit, but sometimes it can be an eye opening discount, especially when the items are already on sale. With some of my favorite vendors, I only buy on sale with additional discounts and free shipping all at the same time...never at full price.

You want to really go crazy...Kohls. Rakuten, daily extra discounts, money from previous purchases, sale items, local pickup to avoid shipping, etc....LOL

I for one welcome our discounting overlords. I went online today (acmetools.com) to buy a Milwaukee M18 corded_or/cordless lighting tripod, for what purpose I won't get into, and was greeted with the offer of a free 5ah battery to accompany it, which I gladly partook of. You might blanch at what these batteries cost. Plus free shipping, of course.

[Bert Kemp]

I recently bought 2 double sided locking cases for my Knife collection, next day I got an offer for 20% off the same Item if I bought in a certain amount of time. well I need 2 more which I was going to wait till next month but hey 20% so their now on their way.

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

I noticed something troubling a couple years ago with facebook. They frequently put up a parade of people I may know to be possible friends. I was using a computer that I sometimes used in my law practice before I retired. On that list of possible new friends, were people I had sued, witnesses I investigated etc. Some of them had not been mentioned in my computer, but were mentioned in old files stored on a recovery disk copied from a prior computer. ie, facebook was searching through my computer and digging out the identities of people merely mentioned in a case decades ago. Some were deceased. If I even look at an ad, for instance, I checked Home depot's price for a nova chuck. within minutes I was bombarded with emails and pop ups for lathe chucks and wood turning equipment. Then and there, I changed my accounts, and got a tablet for on-line things. A new cheap computer is used for the residual law office tasks and never the two shall cross. The business computer NEVER goes on line and the tablet never has any business done on it. If facebook was digging into my closed files and old storage disks, it seems a lot more companies are probably doing it.

[Jim Koepke]

If facebook was digging into my closed files and old storage disks, it seems a lot more companies are probably doing it.

Those who are 'doing it' are selling this information to those who aren't.

Interesting article in the NY Times today:


Some people have a knack for buying products that flop, supporting political candidates who lose and moving to neighborhoods that fail to thrive.

What do Crystal Pepsi, Watermelon Oreos, Frito-Lay Lemonade, Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water, Colgate Kitchen Entrees and Cheetos Lip Balm all have in common?

The obvious answer is they are all failed products. What is less obvious is that they may also share a fan base — a quirky subgroup of consumers who are systemically drawn to flops and whose reliably contrarian tastes can be used to forecast bad bets in retail sales, real estate and even politics. These people are known as “harbingers of failure.”

The study of harbingers emerged from a 2015 analysis of purchasing patterns at a national convenience store chain. (In exchange for the data, the researchers agreed not to reveal the identity of the chain.) Drawing on six years’ worth of data from the chain’s loyalty card program, a team of marketing professors led by Eric Anderson of Northwestern University classified customers according to their affinity for buying new products that were later pulled from the shelves because of weak demand. Of the roughly 130,000 customers whose purchases were logged, a sizable fraction (about 25 percent) consistently took home products that bombed.

“It was really an accident,” says the economist Catherine Tucker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the study’s authors. “We looked in the data and saw there were some customers who were really good at picking out failures” — so good, in fact, that a newly introduced product was less likely to survive if it attracted these buyers. (And if they bought it repeatedly, its chances of survival were even worse.) Professor Tucker called these people harbingers of failure because, statistically speaking, their fondness for a product heralded its demise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/harbinger-failure.html?

You should see some of the ads that pop up when my wife buys new shoes or lingerie online.

jtk

[Jon Nuckles]

ie, facebook was searching through my computer and digging out the identities of people merely mentioned in a case decades ago. Some were deceased.

Perry, I don't use facebook and I am no fan of their actions, but I think it is more likely that they are making these connections through the huge amounts of data they have acquired elsewhere than by doing searches of files on your computer. I could be wrong, and it is scary either way.

[Rick Potter]

Jim,

Your 'Harbingers of Failure' posting makes me wonder how many of those 'harbingers' may have simply been either poor, or cheapskates who buy the stuff after the store has decided to no longer carry it anyway....and put it on the clearance shelf at a closeout price. :rolleyes:

[Jim Koepke]

Jim,

Your 'Harbingers of Failure' posting makes me wonder how many of those 'harbingers' may have simply been either poor, or cheapskates who buy the stuff after the store has decided to no longer carry it anyway....and put it on the clearance shelf at a closeout price. :rolleyes:

How low of a price would Watermelon Stuffed Oreos have to be for you to buy a package?

Rest assured the people gathering this information have such information factored in. My main grocer knows what price point gets me to purchase a certain package of chocolates. They often send me coupons to get me to purchase a couple packages. They are betting that other items will fall into my cart as it is being pushed through the store to buy my chocolates.

If you shop Costco and see a product you like with the price changed to end in a 7 or if there is an asterisk on the price card it is likely that product will soon be off the shelves.

There are more of these. Here is a link about this one > https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/learn-the-costco-price-tag-code-to-save-more-cash/

jtk

[Bill Dufour]

Reminds me of a old sci-fi short story. The hired "pronies" to help explore new worlds. These were people who are accident prone. They would rub up and find out a bush was like poison oak while other folks just never touched it etc. They would explore the beach and only pronies would step on a jellyfish etc.
Bill D

[Jim Koepke]

Reminds me of a old sci-fi short story. The hired "pronies" to help explore new worlds. These were people who are accident prone. They would rub up and find out a bush was like poison oak while other folks just never touched it etc. They would explore the beach and only pronies would step on a jellyfish etc.
Bill D

Even those who some might consider accident prone losers can have a purpose.

427479

jtk

[Rick Potter]

Hmmm.

I like watermelon. I like Oreos.


Yum

[Brian Elfert]

I put something in my cart at a website recently to see how much the total with shipping would be. I got half a dozen emails from them reminding me I still had the item in my cart. I bought the item later that evening after the first or second email. (Not because of the emails.) They kept sending me emails about the item in my cart AFTER I bought the item in my cart!