As competition in the retail sector continues to heat up, companies are opting for price comparisons to stay on top of the game. Costco and Wal-Mart are among six major retailers that will add information to websites and mobile applications under an agreement with New York’s attorney general that will allow consumers to compare prices by unit, according to Bloomberg.
Other retailers getting on board are Walgreens, FreshDirect, CVS , and Drugstore.com. These companies agreed to put the unit prices on their web-based shopping platforms within nine months, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman noted.
Costco and Wal-Mart said they will provide unit pricing information on their websites and mobile stores throughout the U.S. by the end of this year, while the other stores will provide unit pricing online by March 2015.
“As the Internet becomes the shopping mall of the 21st century, we need to ensure that consumers have the same robust protections online that they do in brick-and-mortar stores,” said Schneiderman.
On another note, Amazon.com Inc. declined to participate in New York’s initiative. The company has unit pricing on some pages and doesn’t provide the information uniformly across its platforms, according to Schneiderman’s office.
According to the report, Amazon “claims it will extend unit pricing to its subsidiary Quidsi, which operates online stores like Soap.com, but refused to commit to that in a written agreement.”
The state’s unit pricing statute requires large retail stores to clearly display the price per unit of measurement for most types of food, cleaning and paper products, toiletries, pet food and over-the-counter medications.
What other major retailers could jump on board as this initiative takes off? Stay tuned as the story develops.
