Jet.com’s ‘Lowest Price’ Confuses, Not Convinces

While Amazon’s bitter rival Jet.com holds tightly to its claim of offering the lowest prices on the Web, it’s opening up about the confusion many consumers have when it comes to the way its prices are displayed.

Many consumers have expressed concerns about not actually seeing Jet’s low prices while they are shopping on the site’s product pages.

“Believe me, we have this discussion every single day,” CEO Marc Lore said in an interview with Re/code late last week.

“We keep tweaking the [user experience] to make it more clear and are bringing in research groups. But you’re right, it’s still frustrating to [some].”

Jet prides itself on presenting prices that more precisely reflect purchase bundles, as well as the distance goods need to travel.

“On Jet we have created this back-end rules engine where retailers can preset rules about how they want to compete for business. We apply those rules in real time as consumers shop to steer them towards more economically efficient orders,” Lore said in an interview last month with Forbes.

Jet calls this a “smart cart bonus,” allowing customers to receive savings for making a more efficient order, like picking an additional item from a suggested merchant who has a closer proximity to the shopper. The company’s smart pricing algorithm will continue to decrease the cost of the customer’s order as they add additional items.

Re/code pointed to an example of the price confusion with a Samsung TV shown for the price of $1,597.99 on the product page. While the page does show Jet is offering the TV for an additional “extra savings” of “$34.12 off,” it does not display that the actual price the shopper will be expected to pay is $1,563.87.

The confusion comes from Jet not showing the actual price it is offering the product for and instead only displaying the amount of the discount.

Shoppers also find it difficult to distinguish the way the site uses the + sign, which is displayed between the product price and the discount it is offering.

“In either case, people are confused,” Lore explained. “I think we’ll figure it out.”

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