

Save Money By Deleting Your Cookies--A Case Study - geofffox
http://www.appscout.com/2009/01/save_money_by_deleting_your_co.php
"the room at bally's started at 69 bucks.. then it was 59 bucks.. i just rebooked it again at 50 bucks! i figure if i keep going they're going to pay me to stay there. meanwhile, i also think i figured something else out.. that rate came up after i had been doing some housecleaning on my laptop.. and deleted all the cookies and the web browser history. i wonder if that made me appear on the bally's web site to be a totally new customer?"
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xenophanes
don't delete your cookies. just temporarily use a different browser than your
normal one (opera, camino, chrome, or whatever)

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jgrahamc
Or when you are doing this use Safari's Private Browsing so that whatever
cookies are added get removed automatically.

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jws
This is not the problem Private Browsing solves.

Private browsing still lets your browser show cookies that it already has, it
won't store new ones (except it doesn't have control over plugins, so they
might).

What that means is if you are a regular Amazon user then decide to pop in as a
stranger by turning on private browsing, Amazon will still know you.

What Private Browsing does do, is on window close get rid of all the cookies,
history, field autofills, and such that you accumulated in two hour private
browsing session searching for an opened, boxed, Luke Skywalker figure for
your girlfriend. It doesn't stop the web sites from keeping track, for
instance eBay might still show them in the recent items if you were logged in.

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ars
Get the web developer toolbar addon, and choose delete domain cookies. That
way you don't loose cookies you want.

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ecommercematt
Deleting cookies is also an effective weight loss method!

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RobGR
Much commerce depends on offering different deals to different sets of
customers, to extract the highest price from each individual instead of
relying on the "market price".

Airline tickets are a good example.

In such markets, there may be an advantage to consumers banding together to
aggregate pricing information. If all users of priceline style "reverse
auction" or whatever they call it shared bid info, it would turn it into a
"treasurys style" auction where everyone got the best price that gave the
seller the required volume of sales.

Another way to break the attempted segmentation of a market is to make the
product fungible, so that a secondary market develops if there is any
inefficiencies in the first market. It used to be common to re-sell unused
airline tickets via newspaper classified ads, and airlines got rid of that
after Flight 800 blew up (because of electrical failure) on anti-terrorism
grounds. You can get back the exchangability of airline tickets through some
tricks, and sell and buy airline miles on sites like points.com and
flyhub.com, but that must account for a miniscule part of the market.

Back to deleting your cookies to compare amazon and hotel offerings --
wouldn't a firefox plugin that showed you what prices other people were seeing
for rooms or books or whatever, when you browsed to that page, be pretty
useful ? Maybe it could be monetized by commission or referral fees of some
sort ?

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kajecounterhack
open a new window in incognito mode for chrome.

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mnemonik
If you don't want to leave firefox for a second you could try the stealther
addon until 3.1 comes out.

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coolestuk
No need to delete cookies. Whether you're on Windows, Linux or OS X... just
create a new user account for the particular purchase you are interested in.
When you use the browser from that account it will have no cookies. When
you've finished, delete the account. Next time you want to opt-out of their
'previous customer' pricing, just create a new account.

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pavel_lishin
Wouldn't it be easier to use a different browser instead of creating multiple
accounts?

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coolestuk
I have FF and 1 other browser installed on each of my computers, and use each
browser for different activities. But I see no need to delete cookies (and
lose potentially useful information), when I can just create another user and
use fast-user switching to go to that account. And certainly if someone only
has a single browser installed, then I think creating a new user is probably
easier than locating a new browser & installing it :-)

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captainobvious
just run:

    
    
        firefox -ProfileManager

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comatose_kid
This is news? I figured most people on HN would have been doing this for years
when booking anything online...

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DenisM
I, for one, didn't know.

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brianr
If you use Firefox and don't want to have to re-login everywhere, you can get
the same effect with CookieSwap: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/3255> . 3 cookie profiles... pretty neat.

