“Call for price.” Those simple words in any catalog drive me crazy. While I’ll grant that they make some sense for items that fluctuate in price during the gap between press and distribution, I know that the practice is also used to satisfy manufacturers who don’t want their products advertised below a certain level, lest the public think them cheap.

Even then, the “lowest advertised price” policy works right up until you get to the Internet. Then the practice becomes ridiculous, as when Amazon says “To see our low price, add this item to your cart.” At least one vendor has found an even more annoying method. (Workaround: in a search list, you can sort by price. With a query that’s general enough, you can figure out what the price is.)

It’s time to stop this silly practice. The Internet provides more pricing information than is available anywhere else. Cost is an essential and unavoidable part of e-commerce transactions, and there is no reason customers should be expected to jump through hoops merely to learn it.

I hope retailers will soon discover that fact.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2003 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.