RRPs phased out by Amazon

Friday, July 8, 2016 - 13:45 by Simon Crisp

Consumers recognise that carrying out safe shopping online is a great way to get a healthy discount on most products. And companies like Amazon have previously advertised this fact by displaying the list price, also known as the recommended retail price (RRP), alongside the lower price at which it is offered on their sites.

However, Business Insider reports that this practice is coming to an end, with Amazon gradually eliminating list prices from its product pages. In fact over the past two months they have been removed from almost three quarters of pages on the firm’s US outlet, with an international rollout of this policy expected in the coming weeks.

So now when customers head to Amazon’s site to buy something via safe shopping online, they are more likely to encounter a single price, rather than the sale price compared with the RRP, as suggested by the manufacturer.

Aside from increasing the transparency of its pricing and combating a discount war which has developed in the e-commerce market recently, Amazon is also thought to have taken this action in order to avoid costly lawsuits filed in order to combat so-called ‘phoney discounts’.

Retailers have regularly come under fire over the years for misrepresenting the savings that are available to customers. RRPs are generally unrealistically high for this very reason, since it allows the ‘lower’ price offered by a given outlet to seem much more generous by comparison.

Observers have commented that while this may be a positive step from the point of view of retailer honesty, Amazon could well risk losing out on some of its more casual customers to its rivals. If there is no obvious comparison between its prices and the RRP, people may look elsewhere for their e-commerce bargains in the future.