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Aussie Online Retailer Impose IE7 Tax
First time accepted submitter Techy77 writes "Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. From the article: 'Kogan said his company was able to keep prices low by using technology to make its business efficient and streamlined. however its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7.
"It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions,” Mr Kogan said.
“As Internet citizens, we all have a responsibility to make the Internet a better place. By taking these measures, we are doing our bit.”'"
Market distortion? Anti-competitive? Of all the people you could pick a fight with, you'd have to have fair-sized cojones to take on Microsoft... old software or not.
Wouldnt it just be as effective to block IE7, or stop making effort to code for it ?
While I am sure there will be people complaining, I do have to say I think this is a good idea. It helps get people to using more up to date web browser and stops dragging things along. It also helps keep prices low by making those people help pay the extra coast to keep there outdated browser still working for this their site.
Fuck 'em.
opens with ease, aims to please... fullscreen everyday.
revel in our gay knows that ever in the sun. In the fucking surp4rise, of the warring result of a quarrel raise or lower the ME! It's official those uber-asshole and committees locating #GNAA, Due to the troubles Discussion I'm BSD fanatics? I've it attempts to Baby take my the goodwill
Then we can can go back and eradicate the outhouse developers who wrote code that doesn't run on browsers other than IE7 in business environments and for which there is no budget to develop new costly solutions.
If it's just an extra charge, it's not a Tax. Tax is imposed by Law. Get it Right.
Myu:
...gets you shot.
The same amount of effort will be required to make the site IE7 compatible, but there will be less people paying to cover that cost. Eventually I suppose it would come to a point where the tax would need to be so high that everyone will have upgraded or left.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm a Web developer myself, and cannot tell you how much time goes into making a website IE7-and-under-proof. If we as developers only had to develop for W3C-compliant browsers, our lives would be so much better, and we could spend the additional time on better designs (and more sleep).
Kudos to Kogan! I wish all online stores (well all websites in general) would follow this practice, the web can be such a better place if everyone used the latest browsers!
Let me get this straight, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to properly appreciate the new website in all its god-given glory is 1) important enough to spend a bunch of development resources on and furthermore 2) important enough to risk annoying potential customers with some ill-conceived scheme to offset #1. So much for function over form eh?
no fan of IE here but this is a lame stunt.
I'm on IE6 and don't have to pay the tax lol.
Summation 2
Do I have to pay anything extra?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If the aim of this "tax" is to discourage people from using IE7 and to cover the costs of making sure that their site works for IE7, surely a better way would be to just not make sure their site works for IE7? Their added costs fall to zero. The encouragement to upgrade to IE8 or 9 is quite a bit larger - the site won't work otherwise.
Of course, the company might feel that they'd lose business that way. But this assumes that their customers would rather pay a little extra than change browser. If they thought their customers would change browser given a good enough reason they can follow this suggestion and provide a really good reason at no cost to themselves.
To me it looks like they think they've found a way to make extra money because they fully expect that a sizeable portion of their customer base will not switch away from IE7 and rather pay more.
not much to consider given force updated everyone to ie8 in australia
Many users who run IE7 either have a.) no choice or b.) no idea what is IE7/IE8/IE9 and the differences between them.
Instead of imposing a tax on them which confuses non-tech-savvy end-users, why not display the "IE7 not supported, please follow these instructions to upgrade"?
This tax probably unnecessarily increases complexity in their billing systems, which is never a good thing.
I've been blocking mail from Kogan at work since 2008, because they started out spamming a whole lot of scraped addresses - including departmental contact addresses, and postmaster. It took them two and a half years to notice and query the block, and my reply to their query bounced - so they remain blocked to this day.
Aren't you effectively telling your customers... Try our site in ALL available browsers to see which one gives you the largest discount? Today they are charging for IE7, tomorrow for Opera and the day after that for Firefox?
If thier intent is to make a political statement, they will succeed.
If this is a business strategy, it will fail the same way that U.S. health care (ACA) will fail if you require companies to take all subscribers but do not require all people to subscribe.
As a business strategy, they are spreading the tax across IE7 users, a population that is not required to use thier site. IE7 users may choose to go elsewhere ("being insulted" and "higher costs"), which means the *fixed* cost of the support (web site maintenance) is spread across a smaller number of users. From here, basic economics: the fixed cost results in a higher per-user tax. Resulting in fewer users. Cycling to a higher tax again. (This will be true regardless of whether or not some IE7 users upgrade to use their site -- as long as some IE7 users go away, they have a reduced user population and a higher IE7 tax.
The end result will be no IE7 users and fewer users in general.
So they might as well jump to the endpoint: Don't bother coding for IE7 (saving cost), don't tax users (since they aren't using the tax to fund IE7 support), and as long as the drop in revenue/profits is less than the drop in cost, the strategy is successful. A simple log review will give them an estimate of IE7 usage on thier site. This should drive their decision.
It's an interesting idea, although the percentage seems quite high particularly if they already support IE7 - ongoing efforts to maintain compatibility are probably not that expensive. It can be a real pain at the HTML/CSS build stage though.
I wonder instead if this is an attempt to get a bit of press coverage, like RyanAir who every now and then state they are going to do something outrageous like charge for using the toilet on their aircraft. They never go through with it, but it generates a lot of press interest and further promotes their image as a low cost no frills company.
Changing the user agent won't necessarily work because the browser will still lack support for various JavaScript objects and various CSS selectors. Changing browsers before checking out will probably cause the site to issue you a different set of cookies, which means a different shopping cart.
If that's the case why are they wasting all this time and money supporting IE7 when they could simply stop supporting it and put a message saying "this website will not work with IE7, please upgrade to IE8 or later or one of these other browsers.."?
Because it's a hassle to keep multiple versions of Windows Internet Explorer installed on a single PC: IE 7 for the web applications or ActiveX applications that one uses at work and IE 8 for browsing public web sites while on break. Or because you're not a member of the Administrators group on the PC that you use daily and therefore lack privileges to upgrade IE or to install Chromium Browser, Firefox, or Opera.
This comes down to greed. Nothing else.
Imagine if every corporation adopts this sort of policy.
Restaurants - Tax for not wearing the right clothes. - Tax for asking for modification to your orders.
Stores - Tax for not wearing the "approved" shoes, since you are causing more wear on the floor.
Government - Tax for being obese. Tax for not being married. Tax for not belonging to the right religion.
Schools - Taxed for being stupid.
I can go on.
Remember, this is:
Corporate Greed Policy. Coming soon to a corporation near you!
Be seeing you...
This is a stunt, pure and simple. IE7 use is trivial and you can readily conclude that people who haven't upgraded in 10 years are NOT the primary customer of a computer retailer. People that cheap, don't buy stuff.
The owner of the company is well known for pulling publicity stunts. And hopefully most aussies got a better sense of humor then the whiners above.
As for those saying he should instead display a warning, the site does exactly that, http://www.afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/06/14/Photos/724adc40-b5bf-11e1-a3fb-e6c175e978e8_IE%20tax--236x197.jpg
I wonder why so many are offended by a joke, maybe a lot of them really shouldn't be on this TECH site because they still run IE7 themselves?
This is NOT a business plan or a real tax. It is a publicity stunt to create traffic at the cost of non-existent customers. You don't think that this company really thinks that after a plain warning that customers will be charged more, IE7 users will really pay the increased price? Mind you, they are IE7 users. In reality Kogan looked at their stats, saw a tiny non-significant IE7 usage that their web dev team still had to develop for at greater cost then this groups produces in profit and decided to stir the pot, get some free publicity and be considered by anyone with a sense of a humor as a bunch of all right blokes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1) Unknown company(lets call it B) reads story about another unknown company(lets call it A) becoming known by saying something about IE support.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/1222235/startup-skips-ie-support-claims-100000-savings
2) Unknown Company B makes up it's own press release about IE support
3) Unknown Company B becomes known
4) Profit.
Phil Zimmermann's post-PGP project: privacy for a price:
https://silentcircle.com/
Phil Zimmermann released PGP for free, but he's planning to charge about $20 a month for his new Silent Circle encryption service. It's unlikely to be applauded by encryption-wary law enforcement agencies.
Declan McCullagh | by Declan McCullagh | June 12, 2012 5:30 AM PDT
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57451057-83/phil-zimmermanns-post-pgp-project-privacy-for-a-price/
"PGP creator Phil Zimmermann says he thinks people will pay $20 a month for secure communications.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)
He rocketed to privacy stardom over two decades ago with the release of PGP, the first widely available program that made it easy to encrypt e-mail. Now Phil Zimmermann wants to do the same thing for phone calls.
Zimmermann's new company, Silent Circle, plans to release a beta version of an iPhone and Android app in late July that encrypts phone calls and other communications. A final version is scheduled to follow in late September.
This time around, Zimmermann is facing not the possibility of prison time on charges of violating encryption export laws, but a more traditional challenge: convincing would-be users that protecting their privacy is worth paying Silent Circle something like $20 a month.
"I'm not going to apologize for the cost," Zimmermann told CNET, adding that the final price has not been set. "This is not Facebook. Our customers are customers. They're not products. They're not part of the inventory."
Silent Circle's planned debut comes amid recent polls suggesting that Internet users remain concerned about online data collection (or at least are willing to tell pollsters so), with Facebook topping health insurers, banks, and even the federal government as today's No. 1 privacy threat. Yet even after a decade of startups that have tried to capitalize on these concerns, consumers spending their own money remain consistently difficult to persuade that paying for privacy is worth it.
Zimmermann hopes to overcome this reluctance by offering a set of services designed from the start to be simple to use: encrypted e-mail, encrypted phone calls, and encrypted instant messaging. (Encrypted SMS text messages are eventually planned too.)
"We're going after target markets that have a special need for this," Zimmermann said. "For example, U.S. military serving overseas that wish to speak to their families."
One sales pitch unique to Silent Circle is Zimmermann's own history of high-profile support for civil liberties that recently placed him in the Internet Hall of Fame, including spending four years under threat of criminal indictment for releasing PGP in the early 1990s. At the time, encryption software was regulated as a munition, meaning unlicensed export could be a federal felony. Zimmermann later founded PGP Inc., now owned by Symantec.
Symantec has focused far more on selling PGP-branded products to corporations, not individuals. Symantec's Web page for PGP Whole Disk Encryption, for instance, boasts that the utility "provides organizations with comprehensive, high performance full disk encryption" to protect "customer and partner data."
PGP "moved too far away from individual users," Zimmermann says. "It was geared so heavily toward enterprise that I felt it was hard to use for ordinary people. That was kind of sad. My original intent was individuals. Now I get to go back to individuals again."
Also involved in Silent Circle are Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL sniper turned privacy advocate; Vic Hyder, a Navy SEAL commander and founder of a maritime security firm; and PGP co-founder Jon Callas.
Silent Circle's app will securely scramble conversations -- using end-to-end encryption and the ZRTP protocol -- between two people if both are using its software. If only one person has the
its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7
That's a common problem with "new" web sites. Try writing an "old" web site. It will do everything you need it to do, but it'll be faster, and run on every browser. It can still look very pretty, too.
Or, at the very least, test in increments using various browsers, instead of once you're finished. When I was in college, incremental testing easily made the difference between passing and failing a programming course.
Punishing end users because of poor decision making is ridiculous. I'm all for encouraging people to upgrade to more modern, secure browsers but not everyone has a choice. Companies make decisions on projects based upon their potential income. It sounds like someone higher up made a bad decision (to waste a lot of time supporting IE7) and now they're trying to recover from that mistake by turning it into a political statement. Even elementary school kids know how to use Google Analytics to find out the browser usage of their website visitors. Bottom line is, if IE7 users comprise a large enough percentage of customers to spend a significant amount of time and money in custom development, alienating them is probably a poor decision.
it isn't *that* hard to code a site to look right, and consistent, in ie7 and above as well as the other major browsers
anyone who has actually programmed for linux will understand the problem here. imagine the 'tax' imposed for the support time spent having to workaround the various quirks of redhat, fedora, debian, suse, etc etc. and if you are a zealot about to type in 'oh no its not that hard', kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
Like Rainforest Cafe - require the use of flash to enter their site, thus blocking every device that does not fully implement flash! That'll teach all those God damned iDevice users and geeks who refuse to install the Adobe abomination!
Wasn't there a story some months back about stores charging higher prices to those shopping from an iPad? Nothing to do with supports, just targetted pricing: Market research determined that iPad users would be willing to spend more in general (Presumably the penny-pinchers wouldn't buy iPads), and so it made business sense to use this correlation to determine more optimal prices on a targetted-for-the-user basis.
I used to work for a company some time ago and I clearly remember the amount of days those web dev spent just to get the website looking like all the others. I was surprised by the amount of days and headaches those guys spent just so that IE6 and 7 would look like all other browsers. But fortunately, the company was paid to do so, and their clients paid them....thank god they did.
Let him drive it. Put him in a modern jetsoncar talking to him, distracting him with beeps and blinking cursors, and he'll just have an accident. As usual, they're delaying service to 'slow' customers. Back of the bus?
Did anybody else misread this? The message of a text truly is created by both the writer and the reader.
http://www.vaclib.org/index.htm
I'm not an advocate of such-- but it's not "REQUIRED!!!" you can get out of it.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
;)
Seriously , if it matters what version people are using then it must be a badly designed website.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If not supporting older browsers saves more money in development and testing costs than it costs in lost profit, it's a good decision. Any halfway competent Internet retail should be able to make this calculation, if... they can accurately project the number of lost sales. The real questions is, "How many of my customers will reach the page where the "tax" is displayed, notice it, and then say 'To hell with this'?"
What's next?
Firefox 3.6 users? Opera users (still has that 1% market share outside of eastern Europe). iOS users (that walled garden that already dropped support for iPad1 in iOS 6). DNT flag users? (Pay extra since we can't sell your private data)
The web is dynamic and it's hard for developers to keep up with that rapid release of new browsers, but price discrimination starts to violate net neutrality.
They would get zero on my business as i would take my business elsewhere if someone tried that stunt with me. It is as bad as demanding i have flash installed to buy stuff, which i also refuse to do, and take my business to their competition.
Remember we are the customer, and we are the reason you exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hate to be picky about word use, FSM knows I play fast and loose myself, but isn't it time to drop the use of tax as a word that is synonymous with fee and go back to the traditional meaning?
Tax: a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.
I'm glad IE users are having to pay, it's time for IE users to move on to a better web experience.
Let me guess: you've never heard of AppLocker, which can be set to disallow running executables from removable media or from folders writable by non-administrators. It's been part of Windows (under the name Software Restriction Policies) since Windows XP.
You'd all be rending garments and frothing at the mouth. But it's only IE so people deserve it.
As an Australian I am extremely embarrassed by this blatant opportunism.
So let me get this straight. You charge a tax because it took you some extra time and resources to market your website to users using IE7. Sounds like taxing for the expansion of your business. Bad form.
Perhaps when the software running on a computer becomes obsolete, the hardware should detect that condition and initiate a self-destruct sequence to protect the rest of the world from out of date browsers?? ^_^
Scary as this all is, there is an even bigger problem in the banking and financial industries - where IE6 is _still_ the standard deployment across all corporate work stations and notebooks.
Food for thought.
Another issue is that I am sure that some people still use Windows 98,95 or maybe cough 3.x. These operating systems won't be able to get current versions of IE. Of course Linux users never have this problem.....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria
Companies do this all the time. It's perfectly normal and perfectly legal in a wide variety of circumstances. If you've every bought an airplane ticket, you've experienced this. Any time you can segment a market you should expect it to occur. The proper name for it is price discrimination. The word discrimination has acquired a bad connotation but it really is a neutral term that economists use.
We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
Whatever makes you think they were objective in the first place?
It's not bad enough already that all the wet behind the ears web "programmers"
jump to the latest features so that you always have to run the latest browsers or
half the Web pages look like crap, now you have to pay more just because you
have more to do in your life than babysit your software.
Kogan, KMA.
looks like it's back to IE6 for me
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I will stop doing business with them for that tactic alone.
"Begun, the Chrome Wars have."
Which is why in 2012 Walmart.com thousands of items branded for use with a Windows PC ---but only fifty or so for the Android tablet.
Part of that is because a Windows PC is far more likely to have an optical drive for installing proprietary commercial applications (read: Microsoft Office and retail PC games). Proprietary commercial applications for an Android device, on the other hand, are typically downloaded through the Internet from Google Play Store or Amazon Appstore. The rest is that a lot of Android devices appear to lack a USB host port for connecting peripherals.
They have to support IE7 for you. That does make it their business.
This is something that 99% of their customers do not need, shouldn't the people that use a feature have to pay to support the feature? Its better then jacking up everyones price so they can afford to accommodate IE7 users, which is by far a minority I believe.
They need to work a bit more on their detection code before trying to do this scheme. I just tested it in IE10 and they thought I was using an Old IE and tried to charge me the tax. Jeeze people live by your own advice at least.