VAT Round up - Over worrying or not?

[Ian Allcoat]

Hi folks,

We get very concerned that potential customers of ours might see our business as unprofessional through not being able to get the total price of their goods right to the exact penny. My partner raised the issue that you couldn't imagine for example a company like Amazon over charging or indeed under charging their customer's by 1,2,3 pence. We worry that this might make some people just lose that tiny bit of confidence that is the difference between a sale and not.

I'm baffled that this has been a problem (from what I have read on this forum) for so long without being solved. We work extremely hard as I'm sure you all do to make our site a success and aim to be the best in our business. We have a site that we are proud of in terms of how it looks and the service we provide but are so worried that this could be more of a problem than one might think. Are we being too anal about this or is it something that really is the potential problem we think it might be and if so, why is this not being addressed as THE most urgent blip within the world of Actinic.

FYI, we have applied the workarounds suggested in other posts on this forum but although that does seem to improve the situation, it certainly doesn't seem to solve it.

If anyone has an opinion that could help us to relax a little about this we'd love to hear it. Thanks,

Ian
www.glasses2you.com

[Mike Hughes]

Prices should be correct. For them not to be so is sloppy and will lose customer confidence.

Which specific problem are you suffering from?

Mike

[leehack]

Personally, if i visit a site that has a product at £2.98, whereas 5 competitors have it priced at £2.99, it wouldn't make a scrap of difference to me. I can't really picture how anyone looking at it would be put off.

It's really bad that the software in it's 8th version cannot handle vat correctly, i would rate it similar to having software that has no ability to use vowels in the displayed text. It's fundamental putting a price on something. Actinic are aware of this mistake and have committed to changing it in the next release.

In the meantime i would suggest that there will be more issues affecting the success of your site than this, work on those, by the time you have those sorted, the vat issue should have been or will be close to being fixed.

[oldhasbeen]

We're very anal about this and it's a serious issue. We've got round it for the most part by custom VATing every product to make them display correctly and add up properly when multiples are purchased - we import our orders into our accounts package and manage the sales receipts from there, totally bypassing Actinic's invoices, so this works for us (most of the time!).

The most irritating part for ourselves and our customers is the cart splitting the price down into net, with VAT on the end (making correct shipping charges a joke). Our competitors' sites do not do this - they show VAT inc. prices all the way through.

It's been complained about so many times before I was amazed it wasn't dealt with in v8 - it's such a fundamental issue to get right for retailers, whom I'm sure make up an enormous chunk of Actinic's customer base.

Descends from soap box.....