Recently, many ecommerce platforms, including Didi Taxi, Ctrip, Fliggy, JD and Taobao, have been uncovered that they are cheating their frequent customers. Their ways are pretty clever. When there are new users or conservative old users, they will give a quite appealing price to attract them into registering and buying goods. However, their big data is not that friendly to the stable users and frequent visitors. The system always offers them higher prices for the same products or services. How does this happen? According to the data analysis, the system knows clearly that although they feel the price is high, they will finally pay the bill. By collecting and analyzing users' profiles, buying habits and other information, big data recommends the same products to different users with different prices.
Companies also try other ways to make money, making online consumption far more worrying. For example, video websites always offer 120 seconds' advertisements, which drives people crazy. And even if you pay for the membership to get rid of the ads, you have to "enjoy" 15second "private" ads. By broadcasting them, companies make huge profits — second to the membership fees. Also, owning 100Mbps network, you still put up with the slow speed when you are downloading a song. You have no choice but to become a VIP when you seek high quality services. Users seem to be lambs(羊羔) among wolves. Even though they say, "Since you have money, I'll charge you more", we can't do anything about it.
It pains us that we haven't figured out a way to deal with the problem. The only thing we can do is replacing our iPhones with Android phones if we want to buy a membership card, and applying for new accounts if we want cheaper hotels. Not finding a way to fight back, we can't do anything but accept them passively.
