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No more boasting about that huge discount you got on Amazon

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CIOL Writers
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Amazon ads capture the psyche of Indian shoppers quite perfectly. But the e-commerce giant’s latest move to phase-out list prices, or manufacturer’s retail prices, and directly show discounted prices to the users, seems slightly ignorant of how the mind of Indian shoppers work.

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More than how economical the product is Indian shoppers get excited about the amount of discount. It doesn’t really matter if the price after discount is still on the higher side. If you’re one of those customers who loved to visit Amazon to check out the discounted price of a product as compared to its list price, then you’re out of luck. Now you cannot compare the sale price to the original retail price, but hey, there’s a silver lining; you can still go about searching for the cheapest deals on the website.

Amazon decided to show only discounted price because it observed that users only buy products when they’re on sale. To attract buyers, sellers had to list their products with heavy discounts all year round, thus doing away with sales periods completely. Amazon now believes that the online e-commerce industry has matured and it no longer needs to focus on volume to make up for the losses due to the sale.

The new strategy comes at a time when e-commerce companies are constantly being subject to dozens of consumer lawsuits, stemming from the differentiated discount pricing on the website. Recently, the company had been arbitrarily involved in a fake-discount lawsuit, which was later dismissed by the judge who called the clause as ‘unconscionable’.

amazon e-commerce