Clearer pricing information for online supermarket shoppers

Clearer pricing information for online supermarket shoppers

Recently in the United Kingdom, five major online grocery stores have been accused of mispricing their products. Customers have found that the price they are being charged at delivery are slightly higher than the price that showed up on the online shopping website.

The five companies in question (Asda, Sainsbury, Tesco,Waitrose and Ocado) said they will comply with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in order to help sustain the prices of their products online. The price discrepancy that customers face is that the price they obtain on the day they place their order is different than the price they pay a couple days later when their purchases are delivered to their residences. The OFT has made three provisions for online grocers to comply with. They are; 1. upfront information about their guide price policies and how the online shopping process works, 2. ensuring special offer prices quoted on-line are treated as firm prices for orders that are to be delivered in the offer period, the duration of offers will be made clear, 3. easy access to the terms and conditions.
I believe that this type of price discrepancy is all over the internet. The most common way for online sites to fool you into paying a higher price is to not include their shipping and handling fees until after you have made the purchase. Almost everything you buy online has this type of fee and it really adds to the cost of the products. These U.K. grocers have been overcharging their customers and now realize what they have been doing wrong. This type of price difference must be regulated somehow in the United States because as the internet become faster and more widely used for making every day purchases the ability of the online websites to overcharge its customers could become enormous. Some kind of regulation like the OFT’s in the U.K. should be watching over our transactional websites here in the U.S.