Online Pricing.. Useful?

A new era has dawned.

First the International discounters ALDI, now Australian behemoth Woolworths have elected to show online pricing for in-store products.

How fantastic. Amazing. Simply revolutionary.

All our problems are now solved between this strategy and National pricing policies.

Best of luck shopping equipped with the all the knowledge you’ll now need to ensure you get the best deals.

PERHAPS NOT.

So you can search a database of over 5000+ products and get prices based on “standard” items across all stores (excluding fruit, vegetable and anything with a high margin).

What use is that feature without actually being able to map YOUR shopping list to what YOU need right NOW. In fact, the strategy of providing so many items in such a hard to use format is a great tactic – win media attention but still don’t actually provide a function that benefits the community.

How can this be better?

If you’re going to share your pricing information (which by the way, last time a large Australian Research Organisation checked, was MORE than once per week), why not let others utilise that information and directly benefit customers.

Let people find out how much their shopping list will cost them at each store – what have you got to hide?

Pricing strategies can be sustained for only so long, so surely, given this is not the sole competitive advantage that exists in the Australian Grocery Retail Industry, retailers could embrace being open and honest with the consumer – let us compare and point of purchase.

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