Trading Standards & online retailers

Also someone needs to look at Trading Standards across the whole country.

If you contact your local trading standards, they are not that interested if the company is based outside their area. If you contact the trading standards where the shop/company is based, they will tell you that as you are not a local, they cannot do anything...

Oh and don't get me started about companies who say that they are based in Switzerland (e.g. eBay UK, Paypal UK...)

Drip pricing

While some charges added at the end are clearly preposterous, such as credit card processing fees and such, there is, from the retailer's end, a necessity to add postage and handling charges only at the completion of the order.

This is because a) you don't know the size and weight of the package to be shipped until the customer has finished ordering and proceeded to the checkout; and b) you don't know where the package is to be shipped to until you have the customer's delivery details, which are usually asked for only at the checkout stage.

In some cases, the postage and handling charges can become quite substantial. For example, if somebody orders 25 kilos of books, and wants them shipped to the US, the postage on that is going to be at least $100 if not more. But we can't know that until the customer goes to the checkout. Of course, if it's an existing customer who signs in to purchase goods, then we at least know where they're likely to want them delivered to, but we still don't know the weight and volume of the order until they've finished.

Now some sites in defining "drip pricing" are attacking companies who don't display postage and handling charges until the end. That's simply not fair. The only way around this then would be to require the customer to provide a delivery address and an "educated guess" about how much they're going to buy, the moment they click on "add to cart" for the first time. Clearly, it's ludicrous to expect a customer to do this, just as it's equally ludicrous to attack a company for not including postage and handling until completion of the order and calling it a scam.