I'm thinking of scenarios where if two different browsers visit the same page, they'll get shown different prices depending on their cookies etc. In that case, a third-party site can't really "route you" to a lowest available price, they have to help you make the purchase from the right browser environment.
Here's the real problem:
1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure;
2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops.
1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...
You must load the entire page and figure out where the attributes are in a smart way. You can do this today with headless chrome, in the old days with Selenium, etc.
... which brings us to 2. A mainstream, regionally-dominating shop, particularly any that adopt the marketplace model (Amazon, Taobao, etc.) may have as many as 20 million products. Given 2., good luck refreshing this price list in a sane time, even if you crack the attribute extraction.
If by some miraculous feat you solve these issues you now have to product match an inventory of billions of listings, most of which are misspelt, missing attributes (brand, etc.), and use photos that even a human could not match by sight. Think how hard it is to find exactly what you want on eBay...
The only way is to get the data directly from the retailers. Assuming they will give it to you, you end up with the same problem of feed poisoning that you have with marketing.
That sounds very exaggerated, are you quoting this range from actual data?
For a sanity check the first two shops that came to mind loaded in <3 seconds (guitarcenter.com, nike.com)
Researchers found that black women were getting cars sold to them at a much higher markup than white men. I doubt that is because they were getting profiled as wealthier.
What's old is new again, I guess.
A "meatspace" analogue from 50 years ago would be wearing a disguise to avoid discrimination, for example a woman dressing up in a coat/hat/fake mustache to avoid getting ripped off at the car dealership.
Travel agents were never on the side of the consumer. If you asked travel agents who they perceived they were working for, they'd tell you it's the airlines. This is not just my opinion; in travel industry magazines, articles, etc., this definitely was their stance. They'd choose flights for you that were most profitable for themselves and/or the airlines (and those two factors coincide nicely). Even pre-web, I almost always found a better prices by phoning the airlines directly if I wanted to spend the time.
Resources like Zagat were helpful but could only get you so far.
In pre internet days if you were flying to far away places like India or Vietnam where your local airline didn't offer service, you would have no resources available for finding or arranging flights, hotels, or other transport. That's where a travel agent was helpful.
These types of travel agents still exist but they’re generally specialty travel, adventure travel, etc. companies that handle a combination of group trips with guides and private trips with or without guides. Besides the big global ones there are many that concentrate regionally and/or in a particular type of activity.
When travel agents were local shops, like a local boutique clothing shop, it would seem they had a lot to lose and not that much to gain by working against their customers interests.
In short I wouldn't say "never".
Are there reasons why this wouldn't work?
I am curious what would the legal challenge be if dynamic pricing on the sell side is considered acceptable?
Look at our system now. Big capital can move their tax headquarters to Ireland, its service center to India, its manufacturing to China. Hell, they can now even import low wage workers to the EU and US on visas if it will give them an advantage.
But good luck to any consumer trying to buy products at the same prices sold in these same places (e.g. pharmaceuticals). Even digital goods like games, music, and movies are priced differently, but consumers can never take advantage of currency arbitrage as companies ban VPNs, track IPs, restrict payments by the address of credit cards, etc.
Indeed, corporations are now considered people in the US, which more or allows allows then legislate away any perceive threats to the rigged system.[1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/raisins...
An analogy I'm thinking of is, imagine the website has a box that asks you to input your age, then it shows you your price. If you put in a number over 40, the price will be higher. Now you can just put in a number under 40 and get a lower price, but their response would be to make it against their terms of service to "lie" about your age.
Similarly, they will equate using "someone else's cookies" to lying and claim it is morally wrong and illegal and against their TOS. Even though what they're doing is discrimination.
Indeed, this seems to me to be no different than a form of reselling.
Not just limited to fashion here... electronics, tickets for inconvenient travel time, food, etc.
Would love to hear what you think (currently in beta on fb messenger)
Then retailers will attempt to bring legal challenges against them for breaking terms of service, that will be interesting...