Chybné ceny v Eshopu – Malá esej v AJ

21. 9. 2009 22:42:42

tak jsem psal malou práci do předmětu E-BIZ, kterej mám v angličtině, zájímal by mě Váš názor na myšlenku a taky pokud narazíte na nějakou hrubou chybu v gramatice (ne misspelling) tak ji jsem klidně hodtě, ať vím, na co se mám mrknout :)

Mistakes are usual

There is no doubt that doing mistakes is nothing special. You can mainly get in the touch with this kind of problem in supermarkets. However, these kind of pricing mistakes are very difficult to spot and when you are buying tens of food products it is almost impossible. In most of the cases you pay more than regular price and most of us wouldn’t go to supermarket do get 0.1 € back. Pricing mistakes are also done in e-commerce, but whereas in regular shop mistake is done by giving time-limited discount, in e-shops, where is everything automatic, is the mistake done usually in decimal point thanks to human error or error in database. There is big different in pricing mistakes in real and online world. Real supermarkets have range of mistakes between 20% - 30% (discount rate), in online world you can see the range between 10 % - 100% so in other terms you can buy the stuff for free.

Term and conditions

Customer is protected by consumer law and once the contract is approved, there is not a lot of options how to cancel it. Following this rule, the most important thing for e-shop is “terms and conditions agreement”, because there could be strictly expressed how this scared relationship between customer and retailer is created. This was common initial mistakes for a lot of e-retailers in late of 90s and even some of them paid very high price for that. For instance Buy.com in 1999 offered monitor 164$ instead of 590$ for 4 day. They received thousands orders but when they realized the pricing mistake, they removed all orders and change the terms, that it is possible to cancel order because of wrong price, unfortunately it was too late. They lost the legal dispute afterwards and every customer had to be reimbursed by 50 $, total amount 575 000 $, pretty expensive mistake don’t you think?

Big attention

Internet is the place where news is spread fast and especially e-shop’s realize it very well. Once they have well structured terms and conditions, than there is no chance for customer to claim goods in a case of wrong price. So shop are protected against human and database errors, but this is not end of the story, because as I mentioned at the beginning, news about cell phone for 10% of regular price could be spread by the speed of light. Facebook, forums, blogs, e-magazines and event tv news can be interested in. If the shops is big enough that people could do thousands of orders during 5 hours, you could get free attention for long time, but not everything is bright as it looks. This “wrong” pricing will attract a lot of new customers, but on the other side you could loose the trust of the previous ones and the shop would be motioned mainly in terms of poor quality of shopping system.

My strategy

If were a manager of new e-shop in the market, I would surly think about this as one of the way how to promote my shop. Nowadays in my country, but I think on the Internet in general, price comparing system is very popular. This is a service where all the shops provide their prices for given products and customer has an opportunity to compare them. This is very powerful way how to gain a huge amount of customer, but simultaneously is very competitive (in my point of view it is very close to perfect competition). So if you pick up very popular stuff, for example Iphone and set the price very low, 50% or even 30% of regular price, you can have in one day hundreds of new customers and once they agree with terms and conditions (nobody reads them) you can send them weekly email about your real discounts offers. Does it sound not very fair? Yes it is not very fair, but internet is cruel place to make a business and in the case of Buy.com, costumers wanted their goods and they were ready to initiate a low suit even if they knew that it was a wrong price.

21. 9. 2009 22:42:42