

Literally Random Pricing on Thawte Certs Right Now? - zellunit

Thawte.com for SSL certificates is either going haywire or is split testing prices as we speak. Literally, in the same 30 seconds, I was able to see a multitude if different price-points and claimed 'XXX off' discounts.<p>See these pics:<p>http://picpaste.com/high.png
http://picpaste.com/lowest-low.png
http://picpaste.com/lowest.png<p>Or check it our for yourself:<p>https://www.thawte.com/ssl-digital-certificates/buy-ssl-certificates/index.html?click=main-nav-buy<p>Anyone get an even cheaper rate?
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huhtenberg
Amazon did that at some point. If done discreetly and the public doesn't know
that you are doing it, it is the simplest way to determine the price that
maximizes the revenue. You may end up with a higher price and lower sales
count, but still the higher revenue.

Pretty damn interesting actually.

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SwellJoe
And yet they're all still outlandishly expensive. Why even bother shopping at
Thawte? They've been an irrelevant division of Verisign (the company with
perhaps the worst customer service in the history of bad customer service) for
many years.

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tmm1
It's cheaper than the certs at Verisign. Where do you buy your SSL
certificates?

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SwellJoe
_Everybody_ is cheaper than Verisign. There are dozens of SSL certificate
providers recognized by browsers. GeoTrust and their many resellers, RapidSSL,
etc. GoDaddy resells for a couple of different SSL providers, and they offer a
chained certificate for practically free. It's what we use, and we've never
had anyone hesitate to shop with us (chained certificates have a slightly
longer chain of trust, since you've got a third party in the chain...but no
big deal...nobody understands how that works, anyway, and the browser doesn't
complain about it as long as you configure the server correctly).

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xsmasher
Of course - if the prices were pseudorandom, you could execute a middleman-in-
the-middle attack.

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ice799
Awesome.

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ice799
I tried with a FF3 on OSX and then in a VM with IE8 - got two different
prices.

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noaharc
Probably the User Agent doesn't really matter if they are bucket testing
prices (or if it's glitching).

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aneesh
A good A/B test is often "sticky" (usually using cookies); once you're in a
certain bucket, you stay in that bucket. So a different browser could
conceivably make a difference.

