There’s a chance, according to David Rodnitzky of Blogation. David’s much smarter than I am, so his post is definitely worth a read. And he has a Law Degree so he can understand the intricacies of the Supreme Court’s ruling in LEEGIN CREATIVE LEATHER PRODUCTS, INC. v. PSKS, INC., DBA KAY’S KLOSET . . . KAY’S SHOES lifting a ban on a manufacturer’s ability enforce minimum retail prices.
Here’s the NYTimes take. And Forbes’ view.
This decision will have no short term consequences for the shopping engines or for internet retailers in general (prices won’t change overnight). But here’s David’s theory of how the ruling plays out:
Imagine what happens to comparison shopping engines if, well, there are no prices to compare. I guess they just become “shopping engines?” In fact, the likely outcome would be that the comparison engines would become nothing more than repositories for consumer satisfaction ratings. Since the price would be the same across all vendors, the user would simply need to sort the vendors based on the number of positive reviews.
Of course, in such a scenario, I can’t imagine too many vendors with low ratings wanting to stick around for long on the CSEs, nor would it be likely that poorly reviewed vendors would get too many clicks in the first place.
The end result, then, for the CSEs seem pretty bleak – less utility to consumers and fewer paying vendors.
I’m going to send out some emails to the shopping engines and small & medium sized retailers that SingleFeed works with to get their thoughts. Hopefully you’ll see some comments pop up here soon.
Since I basically copied David’s post, make sure to check out his site and subscribe to his feed.
Retailers will always differeniate based on price, even if that means implementing innovative techniques to do so. This is one of the core pillars of the marketing perspective.
If this plays out as David suggests, then Shopping Engines will need to adapt to more nuanced pricing, such as including rebate, bulk, or special pricing scenarios.