British Savings Week, in its ninth year, takes place this week and offers advice and tips on how Brits can save money. Online retail is growing year on year and although it is yet to overtake traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ sales, its trajectory is almost certain. Conscious of the digital shift British Savings Week is aims to shine a light on how save money while shopping online.
In the competitive environment of e-commerce websites can use sneaky mechanisms to maximise profits. The most well-known strategy is dynamic pricing this allows e-commerce sites to vary prices in line with your buying behaviour, location, and even how often you browse the website. The most common example of this is found in the travel sector, when checking airfares many people notice that a very cheap flight gets incrementally more expensive as you check it.
This can often be solved by deleting your browsing history (and cookies) or by switching to incognito mode. Alongside this, logging out of accounts such as Gmail and Facebook can help bring the price back down, this works as the user essentially ‘wipes clean’ the data which has been gathered up to that point to determine the price.
Phil Browne; British Savings Week organiser said:
“With so many ways to save money online and with 9 million people with no savings whatsoever, this British Savings Week we’re encouraging people to learn new ways to save money and to put that money into a savings account, it’s a way of winning twice over”.
