↑ 收起筛选 ↑
试题详情

In many types of face-to-face retailing (零售), it pays to size up your customer and change your price accordingly. The Internet, by allowing nameless browsing and rapid price-comparing, was supposed to mean low and equal prices for all. Now, however, online retailers are being offered software that helps them detect shoppers who can afford to pay more or are in a hurry to buy, so as to present more expensive products to them or simply charge more for the same product.

Cookies stored in shoppers’ web browsers (浏览器) may show where else they have been looking, giving some clues as to their income and price-sensitivity. A shopper’s Internet address may be linked to his physical address, letting sellers offer, say, one price for a rich area, another for a poor area. Doug Bryan of iCrossing, a digital-marketing consultancy, explains that the most up-to-date “price customisation (定制化)” software can collate (对照) such clues with documents of individual shoppers that Internet sellers buy from online-data-aggregation firms. All this is fairly cheap, he says.

One of the few big online firms that admit to using such techniques is Orbitz, a travel website. Its software detects whether people browsing its site are using an Apple Mac or a Windows PC and, since it has found that Mac users tend to choose more expensive hotels, which are what it recommends to them. Orbitz stresses that it does not charge people different rates for the same rooms, but some online firms are believed to be doing just that, for example by charging full whack (份儿) for those who are willing and able to pay it, while offering discounts to the rest.

Allocating (配置)  discounts with price-customisation software typically brings in two to four times as much money as offering the same discounts at random, claims Ravi Vijayaraghavan of [24]7, a Bangalore-based firm that develops and operates such software. One way to do this is to monitor how quickly shoppers click through towards the online seller’s payment page: those who already seem set on buying need not be attracted with a special offer.

Andrew Fano, a consultant in Accenture’s Chicago office, believes that at least six of America’s ten biggest web retailers are now customising prices in some way, but it is hard for shoppers to spot when this is going on. If they knew, many would feel that it is “pushing the boundaries” of fairness. Companies should be careful to escape the painful experience pioneered (率先做) by Amazon in the autumn of 2000. It was said that the Internet giant was selling DVDs at different prices, to see which browsers happened to be favored by shoppers least concerned about cost. The resulting backlash (激烈反应) prompted it to refund those who paid more.

Users of price-customisation software have so far been unwilling to monitor potential customers’ social media pages, for fear that this would cause a privacy backlash. But the operators at the call centres that [24]7 runs for its clients are beginning to scan Twitter for information on the shoppers they are talking to — and sometimes their tweets give useful clues about whether a discount is needed to make the sale.

1.According to Paragraph 1, online retailers are benefiting from _____.

A. knowing more about their customers

B. charging high prices for their goods

C. making their prices competitive

D. making price comparisons

2.Online retailers use price customisation software to _____.

A. locate customers’ addresses

B. guide customers to their products

C. create documents for old customers

D. judge customers’ purchasing power

3.The example of Amazon in Paragraph 5 is mentioned to show it _____.

A. practices price customisation successfully

B. gets into trouble for unfair pricing

C. pioneers the use of pricing software

D. finds out the browsers favoured most by shoppers

4.Why weren’t social media pages monitored by online retailers?

A. [24] 7 has occupied the market.

B. Social networks block pricing software.

C. Online retailers are afraid of causing angry reaction.

D. Social media users are not interested in discounts.

5.The author’s attitude towards price customisation software is _____.

A. positive   B. negative

C. objective   D. unconcerned

6.Which would be the best title for the passage?

A. Online price competition

B. Personalizing online prices

C. Problems of price facing online retailers

D. Online retailers’ pricing methods

高一英语阅读理解困难题

少年,再来一题如何?
试题答案
试题解析
相关试题