See price on checkout?

[inhawaii]

I was looking at a item tonight and noticed the price was not shown.

You had to click on "checkout" to see the price.

I've seen this before on other venues but never on ebay.

Is this something new?

[valueaddedresource]

@inhawaii it's not new, eBay has allowed certain sellers to do this for years to be able to comply with manufacturer's MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policies.

I know you can access it if you list through the API or certain 3rd party tools, as well as if you use file uploads or feeds through the eBay Merchant Integration Platform.

[mam98031]

I've seen that before too.  I find it very annoying.

[valueaddedresource]

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@mam98031 wrote:

I've seen that before too.  I find it very annoying.

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@mam98031 I've worked for companies that sell products where the manufacturer's enforce MAP and can say most of the sellers probably find it pretty annoying too. 😂

[mam98031]

I have no idea if MAP has anything to do with it.  I've seen it on other sites too.  Retail sites, not sites like Ebay.  Lowes does it sometimes as does other sites.  It is annoying at best.

[toomuchstuffagain35]

Yes, it IS to "get around" MAP, but I've always found it disingenuous at best.

[valueaddedresource]

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@mam98031 wrote:

I have no idea if MAP has anything to do with it.  I've seen it on other sites too.  Retail sites, not sites like Ebay.  Lowes does it sometimes as does other sites.  It is annoying at best.

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@mam98031 Yep, you most likely see it on retail sites because of MAP, which is also why on eBay you'll usually only see it on new, mass produced/branded products.

Some manufacturer's believe their product is worth $xxx.xx and want to protect that perceived value by controlling the price that consumers see advertised when shopping for their products.

Technically "price fixing" is illegal but for whatever reason it's totally OK to say you cannot advertise the item below a certain price because they are only controlling the "advertised" price, not the price it is actually allowed to be sold for (to be clear I think this is all pretty ridiculous but that's the official story the manufacturers have been able to get away with). 

Basically anyone who sells those products in new condition has to either just set the price they actually sell the item for at the MAP so they can publicly display (advertise) it on the item page or they have to play these silly "add to cart to see price" games because some legal geniuses decided that once the item is in the cart, that's no longer "advertising" so you can show/sell it for whatever price at that point even if it's less than MAP.

Manufacturers spend a lot of resources monitoring for MAP compliance and will typically issue a stop sale order to their distributors to cut off non-compliant retailers.

So yeah, it's annoying to have to add something to your cart to see the price but the alternative would be to pay a much higher price if the seller were to publicly display it...all so brands can pretend their item is worth whatever they say it's worth instead of what the market has naturally decided.

And the fun part is usually once a year or so they'll randomly decide the MAP should be more (to keep the perceived value up with inflation?) so if you as the seller opt to display the price publicly and set it at MAP, you'll have to go through and edit them whenever they change to stay in compliance....which may be another reason sellers opt for "add to cart to see price" instead so they don't have the headache of constantly monitoring and changing prices if needed.

[dentalsales4u]

You are so right, we deal with it all the time.

I've had manufactures contact our store and tell us our advertised price on eBay is too low and it must not be below X amount, so we have to raise the price.

On our website, we don't post the price on those items, we list "call for our low price".

There are very few dealers that actually sell at the MSRP, but they don't want you "advertising" below a certain amount.