Dive Brief:
- Only one-third of consumers completely or mostly trust retailers to offer a fair or competitive price, according to an Akeneo survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers released Wednesday.
- At the same time, given current economic conditions, consumers say price has become a more important purchase factor, with 60% of consumers saying price matters more now than it did six months ago.
- As consumers pay close attention to price, it’s raising the stakes for retailers, according to Romain Fouache, CEO of Akeneo. “Pricing can no longer sit in a silo from the rest of the product experience,” he said in a prepared statement.
Dive Insight:
As prices rise and consumers become more aware of personalized or surveillance pricing, shoppers are turning a critical eye toward how retailers set prices — and it’s impacting the customer-brand relationship.
“Consumers don’t like the idea that pricing depends on the person, particularly if the data that enables the practice was collected without the individual’s permission or awareness,” Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting, told CX Dive via email.
If a brand’s pricing strategy leaves customers feeling exploited, it’s going to damage customer loyalty and trust long-term, according to Picoult.
Consumers are seeing prices change depending on where they shop. More than three-quarters of consumers say they have seen retailers or shopping platforms list the same product at different prices in the past year.
But consumers don’t want to feel hoodwinked into paying more. As such, they are price comparing while they shop in-store. More than two-thirds of respondents say they will at least sometimes check a retailer’s website or app while in store to see if they can find the same product for less online.
Shoppers are also increasingly turning to AI to compare prices. An ACI Worldwide survey released last week found that the most valued features of AI tools include price drop alerts and cross-retailer price comparisons.
One-quarter use AI tools like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Google Gemini to compare prices or deals, Akeneo’s survey found. Just over half — 56% — trust such tools provide accurate price comparisons.
Opaque or overly personalized pricing is particularly raising hackles, Akeneo found. Nearly 3 in 5 consumers say they would trust a retailer less if they learned that the price of a product had changed based on their personal information or shopping behavior.
