The Internet changes the rules of product pricing

[mandy]

...web-based price shopping has heated up the competition to a white-hot level in areas such as consumer electronics. Some analysts—and some retailers—believe lower prices offered by web-only retailers in highly competitive categories such as consumer electronics are serving to commoditize those products and drive prices down across the board

Internet price transparency also is creating challenges in cross-channel pricing for multi-channel retailers. A chain retailer’s web site may boast lower prices than its stores because of e-commerce’s lower operational cost structure. Conversely, the retailer’s cost in offering the same product in store may be higher because of stores’ underlying cost structure. The retailer may have many other reasons for different pricing, but these are of no interest to consumers who want the same price from the same retailer, no matter the channel.

“It’s not clear to the customer why a price should be different within the same retail organization, so there is pressure on retailers to normalize pricing within their own operation...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=21563