If you wanted to fly from Atlanta to Ohio for the holidays - and who wouldn’t want to enjoy December in Cleveland - you would probably find yourself using a site such as Expedia or an airline’s own site to find prices and book your flight. Most travelers have come to know that prices for flights change regularly and that certain rules like a weekend stay or 14 days advance notice can be followed to get good deals. Though not entirely consumer friendly, we understand that airlines have to fill up their planes and yield management is critical to their business model as fragile as it is. The one thing we count on as consumers is that two people searching the same site at the same time will get the same price.

What if this was not true? Even worse, what if the Byzantine world of airline pricing models was made even more obtuse and applied to everyday items on the web? Would we, or perhaps more importantly should we, deal with such an annoyance? Increasingly shopping websites have started implementing complex pricing models based on more dimensions than you can shake an Excel pivot table at. What if a customer geolocated as being in Georgia was given a higher price for a sweet tea maker during the dog days of August than a customer in Ohio would on the same website? Would either customer feel comfortable knowing that vagaries such as location, the existence or lack of website cookies, and whether your internet connection is broadband or dialup would affect the price they are shown for a particular item?

As retailers search for the next step of sophistication for their ecommerce sites, many are setting their sites on sophisticated, real time pricing models to extract additional revenue from their customers. While I am not one to bemoan the use of mathematical models to increase revenue, I would caution these retailers about the fundamental value of fairness and predictability when it comes to pricing. In my travels overseas I have become accustomed to haggling in markets to get the best price for an item, while in the USA however I am used to seeing a price marked on an item and paying it. The excitement of haggling in an outdoor shopping bazaar in Mumbai (It will always be Bombay to me) is not the experience most shoppers would want on mainstream ecommerce sites. Worse yet the new technologies being implemented attempt to be transparent to the shopper, so not only are you presented with a different price than someone else for the same item, you are also prevented from asking for a lower price.

The hunt for increased profit margins is understandable in ecommerce as profit margins for online vendors can be elusive in the land of free shipping promotions and rising keyword prices. This situation needs to be addressed by right sizing ad spending and increasing operational efficiencies. It should not be addressed by the growing opaqueness of pricing models. Consumers want and deserve a reasonable clarity in the prices they are shown on any one particular site. If the current trend towards mathematical pricing obfuscation continues then shoppers will only become less loyal to the sites they purchase from, ultimately causing an increase in costly lead generation efforts to combat customer churn. Ecommerce retailers in for the long haul should focus on merchandising, operational efficiencies and customer retention efforts rather than discrete math. As Einstein said “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”