Per-User Pricing at Amazon?

What's this all about? I put a book in my basket at Amazon.co.uk, then realised that I wasn't logged in. After logging in and visiting my basket I was told:

Please note that the price of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days has increased from £11.87 to £16.19 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

A £5 increase in 30 seconds? Something's not right about that methinks. It makes me wonder if Amazon are adjusting prices based on their knowledge of my purchase history. I seem to recall them doing this before and getting slapped down since this kind of practice is illegal in many places. Slashdot has a story on it from 2000, Amazon Refunding The Overcharge Experiment, in which Amazon claim it was an "experiment". Hmmm. I wonder what prices other people are seeing for that item?

(BTW, it's very telling that slashdot's URLs work fine, but the cnet.com article linked in their item has vanished)

Permalink: http://blog.iandavis.com/2007/04/per-user-pricing-at-amazon/

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