Captology Notebook

Well.

It maybe that they are gaining some benefits from moving the customer further down the fish trap of the shopping cart, sign out pipeline. Including the well documented effect that people value more highly the bird in hand; even if in-hand means in their shopping card; even if the in-hand means the capture of semisecret knowledge about the object in question.

But I think what your seeing there has far more to do with the differential pricing games around high end products. The seller (in this case the Leica) is loth to reveal prices in a simple manner because that undercuts his ability to customize the price for different customers. Total transparency about prices forces a vendor strongly toward a fixed price. A fixed price creates strong forces toward a single uniform channel. Given that their primary channel is high end photo stores with huge personal service costs they can't then also sell thru a zero service vendor like Amazon and be competitive. One solution to this is to make an agreement with the online vendors to hide the discounted price; in effect simulating a longer negotiation not unlike that which might take place in the photo store.

Meanwhile the trespass to chattle case law around online stores enables Amazon to command that shopping bots remain blind to the prices hidden behind even a simple device like this one.

Certainly persuasion is involved, but also a lot of this is about how much the maker, middleman, and customer reveal at each click of the negotiation. That's made even more complex by the aggregating power of the shopping bots and the very light relationship the shopper has compaired to the shopper in a physical venue.

Yeah, this thing drives me crazy. Show me the price already... I've send in feedback to Amazon several times on this.