Manufacturers' websites and 'sort products by price'

[mikeymikec]

I was thinking of posting this in 'general hardware', but the more I think about it, I wonder whether it's a practice that is steadily becoming more popular in general.

A customer is interested in me getting them a new printer. As my business goes through fits and spurts of getting new printers, there's always the chance in the months that have passed without buying a new printer that the line-up has changed for the manufacturers I normally look at. So I looked up the Brother UK website, didn't give it any other information apart from asking for the complete selection of printers (no 'home' or 'office' choice or anything like that), and told it to sort them by ascending price. I was a bit surprised when the first printer that came up was about £200 and one I had previously bought. I guessed that maybe Brother have got out of the low-end printer market (I've seen other manufacturers getting out the low end lately such as Netgear for ADSL routers). I then went to the Epson website and did precisely the same search and ended up with a Workforce Pro printer first in the list, at which point my BS detector is going off. In both cases when I scrolled down, I found cheaper printers amongst the more expensive ones.

Previously I've seen this practice on Amazon UK but I assumed that their system just doesn't work very well until you go into the most specific of categories (and even then can be a little squirrely), but I'm wondering if the practice in general is intentional.

PS - I have a browser configuration that basically dumps all cookies and site data at the end of the session, so I don't think this is an issue similar to the business of flight bookings and giving people increasing prices until they use 'private browsing' / incognito mode.

 

[gorcorps]

This sounds similar to Amazon pinning suggested or promoted products to the top of the list, so you have to scroll down a bit to find the start of the actual list you were sorting by. When you look closely you can find the "promoted" badge so you know why it's up there, but I wonder if this is a similar thing.

 

[mikeymikec]

On Amazon UK if I just do a simple search for 'printer' and no filtering, I get an 'Amazon Choice' as the second result (oddly, I get a cable as the first).

If I then search by price, at a glance it seems to be in price ascending order but I haven't gone all the way through the results.

There's nothing like a 'recommended' result at the top of Epson's or Brother's websites though when doing similar open-ended searches.