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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

If I'm remembering right, Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were (or if Best Buy was just taking losses on certain items).

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> Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were

This was also pretty common on Amazon.

Newegg still does this. Here's an item from their 4th of July sale.

https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-008Y-00003?Item=9SIAEG2BMZ4393

KitchenAid is famous for these kinds of agreements as a measure to ensure the public perception of their value doesn’t go down whenever there are sales.

I used to build and manage ecomm sites. We had several manufacturers/brands that we had to agree not to openly display a retail price below a certain amount.

Incidentally, for almost every brand in our industry, that number was 1.8X listed wholesale.

We could sell for less, but not list a price of less. Implementing "add to cart to see price" was good enough at the time to keep them happy.

They still do it.

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