If you’re an online consumer, you know how hard it is to perform even the simplest of price comparisons for many services online. Cell phone services, cable, rental cars and airlines are notorious for adding on indiscernible fees to the originally quoted price. The airline business may soon be struck from that list of notorious offenders. Last week a new Department of Transportation rule requiring airlines to quote prices including all required fees (as reported by Bob Sullivan on The Red Tape Chronicles on MSNBC here). All hail price transparency.
This is a huge win for consumers and the economy. Having greater price transparency helps consumers feel confident. And confidence leads to more purchases. And more purchases leads to an expanding economy.
This is also a huge win for ethically minded retailers and service providers. Retailers who are trying to set an honest price for their consumers intimately know the pain of trying to understand competitor shipping costs in order to see what their true competitive landscape looks like. This manual process not only costs man hours and overhead, but it is rarely transparent or accurate. For those markets where these additional fees are rampant, guilt by association is tarnishing all reputations. (See airfarewatchdog’s Top Ten Most Obnoxious Hidden Airline Fees)
Now that those hidden fees found in airlines are being wrestled to the ground, it’s a good time for other industries to follow suit.
As a retail insider, how do you think this applies to the retail industry, if at all?
