After years of prevarication, I just ordered my first Fairphone, but I very nearly didn’t.
I firmly felt I should be giving my money to the company that makes this amazing product, rather than to a local retailer here in Sweden so started to monitor pricing on the Fairphone website.
Over Christmas, I think the price for the phone was €599 but with a set of earbuds thrown in. Seemed like a decent offer, just waited for the holiday credit card bills to clear before buying a new phone. The earbud offer disappeared, but I noticed that pricing was different across European countries - e.g. Spain had a better offer than Sweden, which was annoying, but that is a country-based pricing strategy, fair enough.
What very nearly broke the deal for me was when I noticed that - even with the same regional settings - I was getting different pricing on my phone (which visited fairphone.com much more often) vs my laptop. €569 (€50 off €619!) on the phone and €549 (€50 off €599!) on the laptop. Does Fairphone play the same scummy pricing tricks as the airline and hotel industries? SUPER disappointed.
In the end, I paid a local retailer €535 with no shipping fees.
we had the similar discussions on regional differences in pricing before
but I have not been aware of any device-related differences
would you be able to provide us with any screenshots?
have you been logged in to your account when checking the prices?
I have never experienced the differences in pricing on the webshop but what I did see were accidental glitches/bugs where the discounts were not properly allocated (usually fixed after being reported) and the website consistently changing the region (and the language) to the Netherlands (pretty annoying at first, now I just got used to it:) )
Here’s the screenshot from my phone - annoyingly, it starts at €549/€599 and then I can see it increase both numbers by €20. On my laptop browser it’s showing as €549. Neither browser is logged in, and both are set to Sweden.
Hello
I just checked for myself.
The initial setting when opening the website on my FP5 was set for the Netherlands - the prices 549 EUR, when changed for Sweden, it updated to 569 EUR.
The initial setting when opened the website in my desktop (chrome) was again the Netherlands - the price 549 EUR, when changed for Sweden nothing changed initially, but when clicked for the shop, it got updated for 569 EUR.
I was not able to confirm any consistent changes in pricing depending on a device.
Thats still the exact same amount as in the other topic, and most likely the exact same reason, VAT. Did you enter a shipping address on the device with higher price?
It does indeed go wrong when I try to check out - I get an ex VAT price around €455 on both and then the VAT on top once I finalise a shipping address. Bizarrely, I’ve manually selected Sweden and the Netherlands respectively on both browser sessions, so it’s unclear why the pricing/VAT rates are wrong.
To be clear though - had I got to checkout on fairphone.com and the price jumped by €20, I would have been more than a little upset.
So perhaps not manipulative pricing but incompetent webshop design.
It might be connected to your browser set-up as well. When I have something in my basket which I added with country germany, not logged in, it immediately changes the price when changing to sweden.
So nothing manipulative, nor incorrect nor incompetent set-up…
I understand sometimes things might be confusing and often the solution is very simple and just a personal set-up on the device and I dont understand why such in my eyes exaggerate accusations are the first step, before just contacting the company and kindly asking for an explanation.
I think Fairphone’s store is just a buggy mess. With all the promotions and the price drop, the website just doesn’t know which price to present. You’re probably seeing some “default” pricing, then some code kicks in to load regional pricing, then some other code tries to show the 50€ price drop…
My guess would be that something goes wrong on mobile in this entire process.
I wouldn’t attribute to mallice, what I can attribute to “stupidity”.
this is not the reason for this case here, here it is related to VAT depending on shipping country. Nothing buggy, messy or in any way related to price changes or codes. So could we kindly stop suggesting stupidity etc. Thanks
I disagree - there are plenty of other web shops that somehow manage to present geography, price and VAT rate correctly and consistently. Some of them even manage to do it in Swedish kronor (though this is less critical for the target demographic here).
If this is due to the cookie settings in my browser, then the webshop is clearly not packaging the data correctly - it should either remember where I am and derive price and VAT rate. try to work out my location and derive price and VAT rate, or assume I’m in some country and present that price and VAT rate.
To show me the Dutch gross price with the corresponding Swedish VAT rate and then reverse-calculate the net price while flashing up a Swedish flag is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
To your point on asking for an explanation - where please? Support? I work in tech and know exactly where such queries land. Recruitment? No, but that’s the only other option on the ‘contact us’ page.
Anyway, I thing @kwasow has nailed it - the webshop is buggy and Hanlon’s razor applies.
(and thread subject amended to reflect this)
The price it’s updated upon addresses, the VAT % its exactly the same for the whole EEC. What you are trying to complain, I think, is related to the shipping method which actually kind of frustrating for the customer I guess.
I had the same question about prices from Murena-Fairphone websites when I bought my FP6 e/OS because It was not reasonable to pay 60€ more just for an incomplete OS to be honest. After some research surfing the web, the real differences were in the shipping/delivery methods.
Although what I really lack from the last report is a better transparency report about economical income from the micro perspective though. This is not enough to point a scam conspiracy (yet).
In fact no - VAT rates are NOT the same. Consider the two screenshots below, which are what happened when I concluded the transactions I started above. The Netherlands uses 21% VAT, Sweden 25%:
Under some circumstances (which I haven’t tested) you can pick a geography and the shop will use the default €599 gross price, remove the promotional discount (€50 here), apply the correct VAT rate (25% for Sweden) and reverse-engineer the net price (€439,20). FP’s net price normally seems to be around €455, so this one is €15 or so too low, which is why we Swedes pay €569 rather than €549 (we always want a gross price that ends on 9).
Maybe this is what happens if you have an item in the cart when you change geography, or maybe there is another trigger. Whatever, the case, the cart will not correct the prices until you actually arrive at the payments page and specify a delivery address.
What it should of course do is update the cart as soon as you change geography. It kind of hints it wants you to do something when you change country:
But this warning is wrong - the shop doesn’t work in SEK or NOK (though, I think, it does work in GBP). But the refresh has nothing to do with currency (valuta is the Dutch term for currency) - it’s to do with the VAT rates.
There is also the possibility that FP has different SKUs for different countries and they embed VAT rates on the SKUs and are doing some sort of item swap in the backend once you change country, but that’s the sort of discussion I normally charge money for
This is not true. Each country sets its own VAT rules and rates. EU regulations only dictate that VAT should always be included in the price and calculated (paid) with accordance with the customer’s country rules.
I think support is your only option unfortunately, maybe @Fairphone_CM could help making the issue noticed, but I doubt Fairphone will give this any priority over other issues.
please help me understand what this issue would be.
the initial post did not challenge differences in pricing. We had these discussed before and I believe came to conclusion that they are VAT related. I think it is now obvious to everyone that the Swedish version of the webshop offers a higher price.
If - then - the issue is connected with different prices shown on the phone and on the website, it seems to be limited to @erots case, neither me, nor @yvmuell were able to replicate that. @kwasow have you been able to replicate that?
On a (hopefully) final note, yes, the support is the proper place to report that. I had in the past reported bugs on the website and they have been corrected. The proper place would be then https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
I’ve tried both on Firefox desktop 147.0.3 and Firefox Android 147.0.4. I could not replicate the behavior on desktop and always got the correct price. However on mobile, I am able to reproduce the issue around 50% of the times by following these steps:
Go to the Sweden store and view the FP6
Go to the Netherlands store and add an FP6 to the cart
Go back to the Sweden store
And here two things can happen:
The webpage reloads, you stay in the cart view and you see the correct price
The webpage reload into the Netherlands store with the language set to Dutch (a different bug I’ve been seeing quite often - the store randomly reset to Netherlands/Dutch)
If the second option happened and you go back to the Swedish store, you’ll see the lower 549 price. I haven’t checked if the price stays lower til the end of the checkout process.
This suggests some kind of a race condition in some code or a bug in some other feature (related to region changes maybe) that fails to update the cart correctly. Could be a caching issue as well, but I doubt that.
And then the issue would be displaying an incorrect price on the store page (a “false offer” of sorts). Arguably, yes, my reproduction case is pretty complicated, but since I’ve seen the store revert to its default (?) state when ordering other stuff or browsing in the past, I’d assume it is possible to trigger it by accident.
Sorry, my point with the Spain comment was that it’s annoying if someone in a different country gets a better price than I do, but that’s a commercial decision I respect. What I didn’t respect was the appearance of it looking like the price was dependent on how often I visit the page. It has since become clear that the issue is a bug in the shop
Reproducibility:
I just tried it on Edge on the same laptop, though I appreciate you may need to be outside the Netherlands for this:
If I now return to shop.fairphone.com, it “correctly” lists the FP6 €569 (down from €619 vs 599 previously)
Clearly geography selection is buggy - it correctly applies VAT, but ignores the target gross price until you give a shipping address (or perhaps it validates the address, though it clearly isn’t checking post codes), though I’m fascinated by the idea that the shop takes a predefined gross price and reverse engineers the net price based on the VAT rate. Is that normal in eCommerce?
