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Comment by nomercy400 | Hacker News Reader

We europeans don't like it when the final, listed price isn't the price you have to pay when you buy something. It's the same for airline tickets: no hidden fees in the final listed price allowed.

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Somewhat unrelated, but the first time I bought something in a physical store in the USA, i thought i was being ripped off, because the final price came out different than the one that was listed next to the item. I had no idea that it was standard practice to exclude taxes from the displayed price.

Yeah that is bullshit that should have been stopped 50 years ago.

I believe it's the same for airline tickets in the US, and I'd hope they do something about Tesla as well though I wouldn't hold out hope.

Buying an airline ticket is a much better experience than anything else online simply because of this. I wish the same regulation applied to everything.

Absolutely. I feel the same way about shipping charges for online orders, which is a problem in European countries as well. I wouldn't advocate to have them integrated into the prices of products, because I think it is worth having a discount for ordering more or picking up your order in person, which passes on the retailer's savings to you. However, I would like prices to perhaps include the minimum possible shipping charges for your location.

It is surprising that eBay manages to do this despite having decentralized sellers around the world with a global customer base, but an ordinary online retailer doesn't.

Still here in Germany we have a lot of offers for services where the discount price for the first year of subscription is calculated into the advertised price.

But it's no longer allowed to automatically continue into year long contracts with a higher price after the first year, so these schemes lost some of their bite.

A family member just made a contract with a "zero fees in first year" offer and the hidden, real pricing starts in second year. As we live in Germany, can you share more information about what you say?

Hm, maybe I extrapolated too far, this became law in The Netherlands a couple years ago and I assumed it was European legislation. In The Netherlands we had lots of these 2 year phone contracts going on where you'd eventually pay almost double your phone's value, those have effectively been banned.

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