Search results

This study aims to analyse the use of psychological pricing in online food retailing. In stationary grocery shops, psychological prices with nine-endings have been a well-documented phenomenon for many decades. However, little is known about the relevance of this pricing practice in the growing grocery e-commerce sector.

The authors investigate the frequency of nine-ending prices at Amazon Fresh for more than 10,000 products from May 2019 until March 2020 for the customer location Berlin, Germany. Applying a within–between logit model, the authors identify the determinants for the use of nine-ending prices.

The authors find that more than 70% of all prices end in the digit 9. This indicates that Amazon Fresh applies psychological pricing to a similar degree as traditional offline grocers. Nine-ending prices are more likely for so-called “want” products such as snacks and sweets than for “should” products such as fruits and vegetables. Also, psychological price endings are used less for products with a higher price level and for products with temporary sales promotions.

This study is the first to analyse psychological pricing practices for the world's largest online food retailer Amazon Fresh. The study results contrast with most previous empirical and theoretical studies, which suggest that the use of psychological prices would decline in an online context.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss web scraping as a method for extracting large amounts of data from online sources. The author wants to raise awareness of the method’s potential in the field of food price research, hoping to enable fellow researchers to apply this method.

The author explains the technical procedure of web scraping, reviews the existing literature, and identifies areas of application and limitations for food price research.

The author finds that web scraping is a promising method to collect customised, high-frequency data in real time, overcoming several limitations of currently used food price data sources. With today’s applications mostly focussing on (online) consumer prices, the scope of applications for web scraping broadens as more and more price data are published online.

To better deal with the technical and legal challenges of web scraping and to exploit its scalability, joint data collection projects in the field of agricultural and food economics should be considered.

In agricultural and food economics, web scraping as a data collection technique has received little attention. This is one of the first articles to address this topic with particular focus on food price analysis.