Personal data is increasingly used to decide what each person pays. Members rule it out: what you pay never depends on a guess about who you are or what you’d put up with.
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How surveillance pricing works
It rarely looks like a higher price. It usually looks like a “personal offer”.
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Profile-based prices
Prices adjusted by predicted willingness to pay, built from browsing and purchase history.
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Device and location signals
Different prices for different phones, postcodes or how often someone has visited.
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“Personal” discounts
Offers shown only to people a model thinks might leave, so everyone else pays more.
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Invisible to the buyer
Nobody sees what anyone else was offered, so nobody can tell it happened.
The pledge
What you pay never depends on your profile.
Prices and offers follow published rules: new customers, students, shipping country, volume, loyalty tiers, negotiated business terms. They never follow a prediction of what you’d be willing to pay. The test: could the business publish the rule that set your price? If yes, it’s fine.
Fineinside the line
Sales, seasonal prices and clearance, the same for everyone at that moment.
Published discounts with clear conditions: students, members, first orders.
Prices that change with stock or demand, when the change applies to every buyer.
Loyalty rewards, basket reminders and personal coupons that follow published rules anyone could read.
Neveroutside it
Prices set by a person’s browsing, purchase history or predicted willingness to pay.
Different prices by device, operating system or tracked location.
“Personal” discounts targeted by profiling, hidden from other customers.
Live price tests that show different people different prices for the same thing.
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The same-basket test
When a concern is reported, and for a sample of members each year, we put the same basket together in different ways. The price has to match every time.
Phone, logged in
Browsed this item three times
Oat and honey loaf£4.20
Laptop, new session
First visit, no history
Oat and honey loaf£4.20
Tablet, different city
Never been here before
Oat and honey loaf£4.20
Same priceWhatever the device, history or location, the basket costs the same at the same moment.
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How we check
Pricing is a signed pledge, published on every member’s record. We don’t run the basket test at every review. We run it when someone reports a concern, and on a sample of members each year, across devices, fresh sessions, logged-in accounts and locations. A proven broken pledge is treated as a Major breach.
This page is general information, not legal advice.
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Questions
Are dynamic prices banned?
No. Prices can move with stock, time or demand. The rule is that at any given moment, everyone sees the same price for the same thing.
What about targeted discount codes?
A code given to everyone who meets a published condition is fine, even if it arrives by personal email. A price quietly lowered or raised for one person because of a prediction about them isn’t.