Online shopping is something that most consumers these days have got used to. With the applications like bar-code scanning and visual search in mobile devices, it has become easier to compare the prices of in-store price and online price of most products. With just few click on the device, we can confirm if the price we are looking at in a store is actually the cheapest or if it is available in any near by stores or online at a cheaper price.
If you are buying online from Amazon, where they don't have physical store then you may be saving on the sales tax too (with the exception of few states). Typically the prices online are always lower and lures customers away from the stores, but the usage of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) seems to counter that measure and adds lot of inconvenience for users.
Manufacturers sometimes enforce MAP, especially on Online retailers to ensure that the price difference being quotes is not too high. The way this was enforced previously was different, where the lower price will not be shown and the user has to add the item to the card to actually know the price. The new approach means that we have to add the item to the card and initiate the checkout process (one step away from purchase) to see the actual price.
It is also misleading because for a 
specific product Sony HX5V that I was looking for the landing page on Amazon says $358 (MAP), while the checkout process reveals a price of $262. This means we need to see how this pricing information is fed to the third party applications like bar-code scanners, as the MAP price could give retailers the advantage, unless the consumer is patient enough to dig deeper.
Amazon has said that they are working with Manufacturers to make this process better and we hope that is going to happen soon.
Author: Vinod
If you are buying online from Amazon, where they don't have physical store then you may be saving on the sales tax too (with the exception of few states). Typically the prices online are always lower and lures customers away from the stores, but the usage of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) seems to counter that measure and adds lot of inconvenience for users.
Manufacturers sometimes enforce MAP, especially on Online retailers to ensure that the price difference being quotes is not too high. The way this was enforced previously was different, where the lower price will not be shown and the user has to add the item to the card to actually know the price. The new approach means that we have to add the item to the card and initiate the checkout process (one step away from purchase) to see the actual price.
It is also misleading because for a specific product Sony HX5V that I was looking for the landing page on Amazon says $358 (MAP), while the checkout process reveals a price of $262. This means we need to see how this pricing information is fed to the third party applications like bar-code scanners, as the MAP price could give retailers the advantage, unless the consumer is patient enough to dig deeper.Amazon has said that they are working with Manufacturers to make this process better and we hope that is going to happen soon.
Author: Vinod
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