What are the legal implications of doing this based on jurisdiction? There are also ethical considerations. I expect this to be another thing which will be an 'open secret' in the tech/marketing worlds until other people find out about it and will be upset about.
There are no legal implications for doing this based on jurisdiction. As one of the other commenters points out, the cost of a Big Mac varies widely depending on your geography. This is an example of McDonald's adjusting their prices to their local market.
As an aside, it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability, age, or gender. This product is not considering in any of that information. It simply considers an IP address and a user agent.
Really surprising that more companies aren’t doing this. I did a quick search and saw that The Princeton Review was doing this (https://techscience.org/a/2015090102/index.php) on their own. Of course I bet if this became more common, consumers would start to get annoyed and try to game the system.
It might be common enough already to warrant a VPN in a low income country, if one is perhaps purchasing from Disney or Netflix or seeking college financing (among the examples from the OP)
I just installed a VPN to see how this works on the demo site, https://concorde.io. Pretty impressive to see the price changes when I change between various countries.
This makes complete sense and makes you wonder why a company like this doesn’t already exist. Seems like this company could help startups and unicorns (need scale) that are stuck due to broken pricing and unlock serious value
Kinda reminds me of the Big Mac Index.. McDonalds charges different prices for the same thing in different countries. Of course that’s a physical product and this is an API and I bet cows in Romania are cheaper than America. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/12/the-big-...
Interesting idea, I assumed a lot of websites would do this via A/B testing in different locations, to determine the highest price a customer will pay in a region. But this is kind of a step further in predicting the price they'll pay.
How much of the persons browser are you capturing? Just the user-agent? I would think screen size would be a helpful metric to segment users... small screen laptops vs massive displays, latest iPhone vs older Android...
There is one precedent for this that spans all people: taxation. People with lower incomes will get better access to products. Meanwhile, people with higher incomes will contribute more, because they're able to.
As an aside, it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability, age, or gender. This product is not considering in any of that information. It simply considers an IP address and a user agent.
Cool website though.
How much of the persons browser are you capturing? Just the user-agent? I would think screen size would be a helpful metric to segment users... small screen laptops vs massive displays, latest iPhone vs older Android...
I do not mind if a company does this — it makes sense to me. But what about other people?