EU legislative developments that affect tb functionality - display of price reduction

[30knees]

One of the changes brought about the Omnibus Directive (only relevant for European traders) is about the display of price reductions in stores. The provision will become applicable 28 May 2022. It's still a while to go, but I thought it would make sense to already have it in mind for future tb development:

Quote

 

1.   Any announcement of a price reduction shall indicate the prior price applied by the trader for a determined period of time prior to the application of the price reduction.

2.   The prior price means the lowest price applied by the trader during a period of time not shorter than 30 days prior to the application of the price reduction.

 

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by 30knees

[30knees]

One more requirement:

Quote

6.   Where a trader provides access to consumer reviews of products, information about whether and how the trader ensures that the published reviews originate from consumers who have actually used or purchased the product shall be regarded as material.’;

I guess quite easy because it's about having a "verified purchase" logo, as eg Revws already has. 🙂

[Traumflug]

Looks they want to tackle those merchants which raise the price for 5 minutes, just to proudly announce its reduction for the next 2 weeks.

[lesley]

I am all for consumer protections, but it gets to a point where it becomes a bad thing and this is one of them. 

[30knees]

On 2/4/2021 at 9:20 PM, 30knees said:

One of the changes brought about the Omnibus Directive (only relevant for European traders) is about the display of price reductions in stores. The provision will become applicable 28 May 2022. It's still a while to go, but I thought it would make sense to already have it in mind for future tb development:

 

May 28 is the date this is becoming law. Any plans on this for thirtybees?

[30knees]

On 2/4/2021 at 9:35 PM, 30knees said:

One more requirement:

I guess quite easy because it's about having a "verified purchase" logo, as eg Revws already has. 🙂

And just a reminder on this. You still need to explain how you verify, though. So it's not as easy as having the logo.

[the.rampage.rado]

Customer protection is always good thing. I personally hate when 'black friday' promos are -5% off the normal price when you check in price comparison websites but now shows -40%.

But as small and medium merchants how much interaction do you have with the regulators in your countries? If you have normal looking shop, you pay your taxes and treat all customers with the needed respect I doubt you had any talks with the regulators regarding your online presence and EU directives. 

As of now I have none GDPR requests in any of my 3 webshops.

[datakick]

Oh my, what a stupid directive.

For example, if I reduce price for a single day (black friday) by 50%, I will not be allowed to announce any reduction for another 30 day, unless it's more than 50 %. Because the reduced black friday becomes prior price.

Also, technically very hard to implement.

[nickz]

With Brexit you can always fund or open a LtD and operate from there.

Netflix, dreamworks are one so its not a that bad neighborhood.

Edited May 24, 2022 by nickz

[30knees]

On 5/24/2022 at 1:09 PM, the.rampage.rado said:

Customer protection is always good thing. I personally hate when 'black friday' promos are -5% off the normal price when you check in price comparison websites but now shows -40%.

But as small and medium merchants how much interaction do you have with the regulators in your countries? If you have normal looking shop, you pay your taxes and treat all customers with the needed respect I doubt you had any talks with the regulators regarding your online presence and EU directives. 

As of now I have none GDPR requests in any of my 3 webshops.

In Germany there are specialized organizations that look for legal mistakes and have the right to "fine" (Abmahnung in German). They don't mind going after small merchants.

[30knees]

On 5/24/2022 at 4:57 PM, datakick said:

Also, technically very hard to implement.

Does this mean no implementation by thirtybees?

 

[30knees]

On 5/24/2022 at 4:57 PM, datakick said:

For example, if I reduce price for a single day (black friday) by 50%, I will not be allowed to announce any reduction for another 30 day, unless it's more than 50 %. Because the reduced black friday becomes prior price.

It's going to be interesting to see how big merchants will deal with this and show the price history.

[datakick]

21 minutes ago, 30knees said:

Does this mean no implementation by thirtybees?

 

I assume this regulation is concerned about final prices. As you know, there is no 'single' final price in thirty bees. There are a lot of components that can impact final price - customer group reductions, specific prices reductions, cart rules, quantity discounts, specific prices for different currencies, etc...

Theoretically, the function to calculate final price depends on

• customer group
• customer
• country
• currency
• quantity
• carrier

price(productId, customerGroupId, customerId, countryId, currencyId, carrierId, productQuantity) -> number

Of course, in most cases, the final price is the same. But it *can* be different.

So, for every productId, we would have to calculate final prices for all combinations of these input variables to figure out the lowest final price, and save it somewhere to price history table. And we would have to recalculate prices (sometimes for all products, sometimes only for subset of products) every time something important changes, like

• product base price changed
• customer group reduction changed
• product carrier association
• specific prices was created, deleted or modified
• cart rule was created, deleted or modified
• customer group was created, deleted, or modified

Alternatively, we could calculate lowest price for all products periodically, like once a day. But then there would be a potential for breaking the law, as a short-lived price reduction might not be caught and tracked in price history table.

Then, some merchants will want a functionality to track multiple lowest prices, for example for 'Wholesale customers' and 'Normal customers' groups. This will make it even more complicated. 

All of that is a huge amount of work. Just to track price history. 

This regulation was clearly designed for brick and mortal shops, where there is only one single price displayed on a shelf. In dynamic e-commerce environment this makes much less sense.

[30knees]

10 hours ago, datakick said:

This regulation was clearly designed for brick and mortal shops, where there is only one single price displayed on a shelf. In dynamic e-commerce environment this makes much less sense.

No, it's not clearly designed for brick and mortar shops. 

A number of the recitals indicate the digital nature, such as this one:

Quote

Traders may personalise the price of their offers for specific consumers or specific categories of consumer based on automated decision-making and profiling of consumer behaviour allowing traders to assess the consumer’s purchasing power. Consumers should therefore be clearly informed when the price presented to them is personalised on the basis of automated decision-making, so that they can take into account the potential risks in their purchasing decision. Consequently, a specific information requirement should be added to Directive 2011/83/EU to inform the consumer when the price is personalised, on the basis of automated decision-making. This information requirement should not apply to techniques such as ‘dynamic’ or ‘real-time’ pricing that involve changing the price in a highly flexible and quick manner in response to market demands when those techniques do not involve personalisation based on automated decision-making. This information requirement is without prejudice to Regulation (EU) 2016/679, which provides, inter alia, for the right of the individual not to be subjected to automated individual decision-making, including profiling.

That being said, I think it's very dangerous and not very conducive for thirtybees's success in the EU to ignore legal requirements because they're difficult to implement. 

I do appreciate the technical challenge you face and I also very much see that such legislation makes it harder for smaller providers like thirtybees to succeed.  Still, merchants have to comply with the law.

[the.rampage.rado]

11 hours ago, 30knees said:

In Germany there are specialized organizations that look for legal mistakes and have the right to "fine" (Abmahnung in German). They don't mind going after small merchants.

I purchase goods on daily basis from Germany and in none of the websites I purchase there is GDPR compliance or detailed cookie settings or else?

[30knees]

19 minutes ago, the.rampage.rado said:

I purchase goods on daily basis from Germany and in none of the websites I purchase there is GDPR compliance or detailed cookie settings or else?

Not every page gets fined, of course. (And note: You don't need a cookie banner if the cookies are technically necessary. There's also not too much that is "GDPR" required that's customer facing beyond a proper privacy policy.)

Here's information on the Abmahnung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung 

[lesley]

Just out of curiosity, do you know of any shopping cart software that supports this? 

[30knees]

7 minutes ago, lesley said:

Just out of curiosity, do you know of any shopping cart software that supports this? 

I'm also curious. I just did a quick search and found plugins for WooCommerce and Prestashop. Shopware was blogged about it, so I'd assume (hope) they support it. I'm curious how Shopify will deal with this. I guess we'll see more and more support in the next days and weeks. I'll post if I stumble across anything.

[lesley]

Because for feature purpose, I think they are relevant, could you post the plugins you found. I am not sure what to specifically search. 

[30knees]

I searched for "shop software omnibus directive" and found:

https://codecanyon.net/item/omniprice-prestashop-omnibus-directive-compatibility-module/37331365 (might even work with tb, it's PS 1.6 compatible! I'll check it out.)

https://www.zemeilleur.com/omniprice-module-de-compatibilite-prestashop-omnibus-directive/

https://cl.wordpress.org/plugins/omnibus-for-woocommerce/

https://www.wpdesk.net/products/wp-desk-omnibus/

[lesley]

Oh, so paid modules, none have added it to the core? 

[datakick]

7 hours ago, lesley said:

Oh, so paid modules, none have added it to the core? 

It's not much of a core material, given that only a subset of merchants would want such feature (only EU, and I guess they do not want it). No changes to the core are needed in order to implement this functionality in a module as well. 

[lesley]

That is kind of what I was getting at. That none of the other e-commerce packages have released an official plugin or added this to their core. I wonder if there is a reason behind that. 

[30knees]

Shopware definitely has: https://www.shopware.com/en/news/shopware-6-release-news-april-2022

[khtmhai5]

I do appreciate the technical challenge you face and I also very much see that such legislation makes it harder for smaller providers like thirtybees to succeed.  Still, merchants have to comply with the law.

vidmate apk
mobdro download
 

Edited June 16, 2022 by khtmhai5