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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

I know, slightly off-topic, but I wish instacart didn't mark up the price of each item. It feels like it lacks transparency and is some sort of dark pattern because I don't know how much I'm paying for, say, food and how much I'm paying instacart. I'd much rather see a flat % fee, say 10% or something.

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That’s because it is a dark pattern of hiding the true price through death by a thousand fees.

They try to get you from every angle. They mark up the price. They add a service fee. They add a delivery fee. They add a tip (which is its own can of worms...)

If it was just “Buy whatever you want at regular price but we’ll throw on $40” a lot of people would balk.

Airbnb is also a very big user of this pattern. You can't search by total price, including fees, just the base nightly rate: which makes it difficult to compare options, since one host might have a $20 cleaning fee, and another has a $250 one.

That can make a big difference in total price for short (2-3 night) stays.

I end up with 40 browser tabs. Oh, and if you want to book via mobile app, they charge more for that. Have to use a web browser for the best price.

I built a browser extension to help mitigate this type of issue. A lot of people like to think about the cost of lodging in terms of nightly price as opposed to the total, so the extension shows the true nightly price of a stay, after account for all fees, taxes, etc. Unfortunately, right now there's not a great way to get the true* totals to show up in search results, but the extension will show you the real price per night of your stay once you're on a place's listing page.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/airbnb-price-...

And it's completely open source: https://github.com/davidsawyer/airbnb-price-per-night-correc...

*Airbnb leaves out taxes in their "totals", which can skew the true total by a significant amount

I'm more forgiving about taxes being left out, only because it's an equal percentage for each listing. If I have a map of 10 listings, and they're all N% less than they should be -- I can still somewhat easily compare them, as they are all equally wrong.

There might be edge cases to my thinking, as if you map view listings along a jurisdictional boundary, there may be taxes in one city and not another.

This is awesome! Thank you so much for doing this :)

I think if you specify your dates and length of stay you can search by the total cost but I agree its certainly frustrating and for short trips makes the service annoying and nearly useless/cost prohibitive.

Overall, I think its better to have the cleaning fee separate, otherwise you penalize people who stay long and don't get cleaning service during their stay.

The cleaning fees charged by hosts are not optional. You cannot opt out of them. If Airbnb wanted to empower users, they could permit enabling/disabling those fees while querying.

>I think if you specify your dates and length of stay you can search by the total cost but I agree its certainly frustrating and for short trips makes the service annoying and nearly useless/cost prohibitive.

Unfortunately, they leave out taxes in these "totals", so you're not quite getting the full picture in the search results.

>Oh, and if you want to book via mobile app, they charge more for that.

Source?

This wasn't from an article or written source, it is from personal experience. I took the exact same listing, guest count, and dates, and got different prices in my browser vs Airbnb iOS app. I checked a 2nd listing, same story. This was about a year ago; I have not checked recently if it's still the case.

The challenge with very specific filters with Airbnb is that you will get a lot fewer results. The prices are not exactly standardized since the host's set them.

Without dates, you cannot see the true price because prices fluctuate between dates and ranges. If set the dates, and number of guests, you can see the total price and breakdown on the search page. The search page price doesn't include the taxes (I guess it's a common practice in the US), but you can see it on the listing page. The prices should be the same on mobile and web unless you search different days and the prices have fluctuated or there is a caching issue.

Airbnb is the ultimate scam in my book. No better than booking.com.

i've ordered from them pre-pandemic and they use just about every dark pattern and asshole design in the book. amazing really.

I've done part-time work for one delivery service. For certain pick-up locations, they instruct the deliverers to not give the receipt to the customer.

It just depends on the store. Not all stores have markups above the store price.

just depends on the terms of the contract they have with each store. Markup is likely shared.

From my understanding, the prices are set by the store, which can be corroborated by the DoorDash/Uber Eats models. It's impossible for Instacart to handle the prices for all these stores, so they unload that responsibility to the individual stores. The store probably forgets to drop the price, or will mark up volatile prices so they won't have to do weekly updates. I can bet you that you can also find some items that are under priced.

Fine print in app says Instacart sets the price

Which goes against what has been said here: https://youtu.be/YOKqAIMh-iA?t=1538 I'll admit both answers can be correct (retailers send the prices for instacart to baseline off of). They have historically marked up the product with their better grocers (who in turn give them a %3 discount to offset credit card processing).

My understanding is that the prices are set by Instacart, based on estimates on what they've seen the store charge in the past, plus some markup for price change risk, and probably some amount of profit/cost of maintaining the pricing data and product catalog.

That is what Shipt does, membership fee + flat fee. I interviewed with them and while I can't share a lot of what I learned out of respect, the engineering team really seemed to drill into me that Shipt is not a shady service. I ended up accepting a position local to me but when I enter the job market again I plan on reaching out to the recruiter I was working with last time.

Our local Kroger affiliate, QFC, offers grocery delivery via Instacart. The pricing appears to match the in-store pricing. A delivery fee is layered on top.

I wonder if some stores form partnerships, while others don't and Instacart does what they want there.

100% this. I made a pretty large costco order with instacart yesterday and expected to pay 15% in fees and tip, but when the order came I saw the store receipt and they overcharged me on almost every single item. The instacart order total was 35% more than what was spent at the store. The total lack of transparency is infuriating and I very much feel cheated.

That's why I buy from the stores that are "Everyday Store Prices". Stores like Costco have a markup but the app clearly says "Higher than in-store prices". It's kinda hidden https://www.instacart.com/help/section/200758534

> I know, slightly off-topic, but I wish instacart didn't mark up the price of each item.

Amazon India does this as well from my observation (one way is to look for 1 star reviews complaining about the fact) and I'm not even sure it is legal to do so given price-control via MRPs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_retail_price

They (or sellers?) go to the extent of blacking-out MRPs from product images [0], though it might be that they might not want to keep updating the images for every price change (changes don't happen often, if ever).

I caught them once and was offered ~$3 refund on an item with MRP of ~$6 which was sold at ~$9.

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Kelloggs-Muesli-Fruit-Nut-750/dp/B07CZ...

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