BestBuy.com’s MAP Policy Workaround

“I hate that! Hate it! Hate it! Hate it! It almost makes me want to not buy from this site because they do that!”

The user was furious. She was shopping for a notebook computer on CircuitCity.com and the site wouldn’t tell her the price unless she first put the product into her cart. She didn’t understand why Circuit City wanted her to go through this extra work. She was upset.

I don’t blame her. After all, it does feel like a deceptive practice. Does the site think that we’ll accidentally leave an expensive product in our cart and then purchase it? What sort of idiot do you take us for?

Interestingly, it’s not deceptive at all. It’s just archaic.

The practice is known as the MAP (Minimum Advertised Pricing) policy in the retail business. It’s as old as the hills. It goes back to the days when the really big retailers started showing up on the scene.

In those days, large stores like Sears, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart could purchase in such huge quantities that they could garner huge discounts from the manufacturers. The little shops couldn’t compete, so the manufacturers negotiated with the big guys that they weren’t allowed to tell shoppers anything less than “Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price” (MSRP) unless they were in the store. The MAP policy was born to make life fair for the little guys, but preventing the big stores from stealing their customers by advertising lower prices in the Sunday circulars.

When the web rolled around, the manufacturers needed an equivalent for “coming into the store to learn the price.” Somebody came up with the bright idea of only revealing the price when the item is placed in the shopping cart was a virtual-world equivalent and the practice became contractual cement.

So, that brings us to the day we conducted our testing of CircuitCity.com and every other retailer. Everybody had items they wanted to sell at lower than MSRP and their MAP policy contracts only allowed them to reveal the price after the shopper placed it in the cart.

But, our shoppers didn’t know about this little piece of retail history. They didn’t know anything about why this was the policy on so many sites. And in their natural distrust of anything suspicious, they just assumed it was a nefarious attempt to trick people into buying things. It didn’t help that it was a completely transparent trick. It still felt devious.

How does a site follow their contractual agreement with the manufacturers without making users feel something deceptive is going on? The designers at BestBuy.com came up with a brilliant idea.

They replaced the price with a See price in cart. When you click on that, you get this pop-up:

Click to see the pop-up message at full size.

This gives Best Buy’s shoppers two options: either leaving it in the cart or automatically removing it because they are “just checking the price.” Underneath the covers, the product was officially added to the shopping cart, making it contractually correct. But the remove-it button pulled it out of the cart before the user noticed, making the experience seamless.

After Best Buy launched this new approach, Circuit City followed almost immediately and others have copied the same technique. Amazon still makes you officially add it to the cart, but that’s just one of many odd things that Amazon has kept in their design. (Don’t get me started on the multiple-merchant stuff!)

Best Buy’s designers (and now others) are doing a little slight-of-hand technique, using the age-old art of misdirection, to give the potential customers a better experience while staying within the legacy business arrangements they have with their vendors.