In theory it sounds great: promise your customers that you will match any (lower) price they could find elsewhere and they’ll always come to you knowing they’ll always pay the lowest possible price. In practice, count on the fact that many will be too lazy to actually contact you especially if you make the whole process complicated.

On the Internet though, the rules change. It is easy to find other places that sell the same thing and it’s usually very easy to report a lower price elsewhere. How will the merchant get out of this situation? Yes, I am assuming that online merchant’s promise of “we’ll match any price you find on the net” is a marketing ploy and nothing more.

I was pleasantly surprised today. I bought some optical cables from TopAchat and noticed the claim about matching price. Since I knew that Amazon had the lowest price (but only one cable in stock, otherwise I would have bought the cables from them) I decided to see if TopAchat will honestly honor the promise. Submitting the claim was simple – I had to enter the direct URL to the product on the other site and its price. All of this took place late last night, around 23h.

A couple of minutes ago, around 10h I got the confirmation mail – TopAchat will do as promised and reimburse me! Considering how ridiculous the difference in the price actually is in this case – 2.6€ for both cables – their response is even more impressive.

What this means is that from now on, I will be safe knowing that I can buy anything from them for the lowest price I can find at any other merchant’s site! This makes both of us happy – they get a lot of business from me (and other users) and I get to shop at one place, for the best price possible and I get to minimize the shipping costs too.