Drip Pricing Traps: Are Hidden Fees Hiking up the Final Price of Your Online Purchase? Seek Help at the National Consumer Helpline

We are now in a world where anything and everything is available online, and most of the time these products could be bought at exciting discounted prices. However, in certain cases, we might have seen the price of the product initially lower getting hiked up at the time of checkout. If you are among the many that have been a ‘victim’ of this ‘theft’ or ‘scam’, this article is for you and how to deal with it.

Read more about it below.

Call the National Consumer Helpline at ‘1915’ to Report Drip Pricing Traps

When the full price of a product is hidden upfront and extra charges are added later during checkout, this is a perfect example of what is called ‘drip pricing’. India’s Department of Consumer Affairs has now issued a warning regarding drip pricing traps, and if you have come across this dark pattern, report the matter at the national consumer helpline at ‘1915’ for seeking help.

Looking more into the matter, such practices are common in e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon, as well as on food and grocery delivery platforms such as Swiggy and Zepto. While Amazon has something called ‘marketplace fee’, Flipkart charges ‘offer handling fee’, ‘payment handling fee’, ‘protect promise fee’, ‘pick up charge’, and ‘platform fee’. On Swiggy, under ‘GST & Other Charges’, ‘restaurant packaging’, ‘platform fee’, and ‘restaurant GST’ are all there and being charged, while when visiting the restaurant in-person and ordering it, no such charges are taken. [Just to add, during cancellation of an order, even after 1 minute of booking, both Swiggy and Zomato charges 100% as cancellation fee.]

This initiative taken by the Department of Consumer Affairs of India is a good step, but the real problem lies in the retailer-level (online) and not in the consumer-level (as indicated above). Also, there are still a lot that are left uninformed – After reporting the matter, how does the Consumer Affairs Department plan to address it? Should the consumer make the purchase or not? If the consumer makes the purchase, will he or she get a refund and compensation? We’ll have to wait and see how the matter is taken forward after the complaint(s).