Internet oddity

[Aggers]

I never cease to be amazed at the odd things that can happen when on the Internet.

This afternoon Mrs A and I were both looking on the Internet for something we wanted to purchase,
she on her Android tablet and me on my Laptop. We both found what we were looking for, and had
both landed on what we thought was the same Company's website - same Company, same telephone
number and same product, But to our surprise the prices shown differed, and certain information on
the product was omitted on the one. The Tablet search engine is Google, and my Laptop uses Bing, but
I wouldn't have thought that would make any difference. Has anyone else ever experienced this sort of
odd thing?

We phoned up the Company and placed our order. Their price was the lower of the two we had found.

[Suff]

Web sites now know whether you are using a phone, tablet or PC. If you look closely, you will see somewhere, whether in the URL or in the site itself, that the tablet is accessing the "mobile" site and the PC is accessing the main site. Clearly the two sites are using static content instead of a database for prices. Which means that one of them was more up to date than the other.

Sorry for the jargon but it's difficult to explain. If you use static content it's like a text file or a spreadsheet, someone writes the prices in it then you put each text file or spreadsheet in many different places for the site to read. Of course if you need to update it, then you need to update every file.

Dynamic content is different. You keep a central database and the prices are stored there once. Every area on the site looks up the one database. When it's changed in the database, it is reflected everywhere. Of course if you are not a professional developer, then reading a database on the web is not easy to do but reading a text file or spreadsheet is.

Interesting that they are selling cheaper by phone though... Probably reflects their customer model and how up to date their website is...

[Aggers]

Thanks, Suff.

now I understand.