[neltnerb]

I almost only see this for very expensive non-commodity products. I think in these industries the vendors at least believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they do it person-to-person over the phone. I don't know if they're right or not, when I see that my first step is to look for other vendors.

But I think that they simply believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they screen for only people interested enough to submit a request for a quote. That's not really a dark pattern, yeah. It's not a trick, they just don't want to sell stuff that way.

Vici-Valco is the most confusing one to me for this, but I believe for them it's to create a barrier to keep small time orders out. Basically, I don't think that they make much money on me ordering ten compression fittings so if they make it too easy to find prices and order stuff without human intervention they'd spend proportionally more time on small clients? It's odd, I mean, they do have a catalog and the catalog has prices. It's just super hard to order online or find pricing otherwise.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

There's a vendor I deal with that does something like this. They have an online catalog and prices are listed, but to buy something, I have to email them and then they respond with a link to their fulfillment partner.

At first I thought it was really dumb, because they're in a technology sector and deal with engineers all the time. Why not just take me to a shopping cart? But then I got an email that said something like "HeyLaughingBoy, I noticed you bought 5 units of $SENSOR in July and another 10 units in August. Would you like to discuss volume prices going forward? We can scale the price to your estimated annual volume..."

I thought it was a great idea to get a dialog going with someone who looks small time (me) but could become a major customer. This way, they build a relationship with me before I just start looking for someone cheaper as my sales grow. If they just listed prices at preset volume levels, that would never happen.

[hctaw]

It's more about charging prices based on what customers are willing to pay rather than a fixed price. In B2B sales you can swing much higher prices from bigger clients for the same thing, but that's harder if they know what you charge smaller businesses.

[_wldu]

People talk. I'm in a specific industry and on a lot of industry specific mailing lists. When companies charge some of us extra, everyone quickly learns about it and that ends up making the vendor look bad and makes everyone in the industry seek alternatives.

[1123581321]

It's not that companies are charging arbitrarily different amounts. They package features and levels of service or support differently for bespoke contracts, and that makes some of them cost more.

Any email list that failed to observe this would not be useful other than for the small companies looking for the feature/price floor.

[neltnerb]

Within reason, I personally am not offended by small variations based on legitimate negotiating for larger volumes (or even smaller volumes). I feel like most places will give you at least a bit of a discount if you offer something in return like enough volume to make it less hassle to sell to you.

Or if you just ask... I've definitely gotten 5-10% "discounts" multiple times just by asking if they can give me one. I figure this is the "wasn't price sensitive enough to ask" surcharge.

But if the prices were super random feeling yeah, for sure. I haven't personally run into more than a ~5-10% variation myself usually.

I think the only time I hear about it is when I get a price from a vendor, turn them down, and then have them come back with an offer for the same thing at 25% off. At that point they're kind of highlighting that their pricing is 25% higher than it needs to be for them to make a healthy profit so while I might take them up on it (once) I'm extremely likely to find a new vendor.

I've definitely done that before with a company that had dramatically overpriced high speed cameras. We kept ordering from them because we didn't want to worry about changing the brand. I doubt we'll order from them again.