The e-commerce industry, as well as brick-and-mortar retail, is evolving into a new era of transparency and better consumer experience. The new initiative by the EU results in the creation of new rules that aim to protect users' rights. These new rules will make it easy and clear for consumers to understand when they have been misled, tricked, or cheated by a company's promotion scenarios.
To modernize and strengthen consumer rights, the European Union issued a new Directive. The Omnibus Directive establishes a new consumer protection rule, introducing an additional obligation to regulate price transparency for discounts and promotions.
The EU is putting an end to the days of retailers playing games with shoppers. It will be a simpler, more transparent, and fairer system that benefits customers. The new rules will ensure that each customer clearly sees when promotional offers are genuine discounts rather than false bargains.
The European Commission has introduced a rule in which, for discounted products/services, companies must display the lowest price, which was applied during the 30 days before the price reduction, to ensure that the discounts introduced are genuine and therefore beneficial to the consumer.
Creating the right balance between price transparency and a fair market has been a challenge. The European Commission has attempted to address this and has created new rules to ensure consumer protection. If you want your customers to make well-informed decisions about the products and services you offer, you need to comply with the Omnibus Directive.
With Synerise, you can make a smooth transition to the new e-commerce rules without having to engage any additional external tools or services to comply with the new regulations. The flexibility of the solutions offered by Synerise makes it possible to quickly adapt to the required changes while making comparatively small adjustments to activities that have been implemented previously using the platform.
Having in mind that discounted products/services should now additionally display the lowest price from the last 30 days before the discount was introduced, companies try to find the most suitable place on the page to show this information. Since such information should be as clear as possible, not hidden from the user in any way, the lowest price notice is most often displayed on the main product page and in the recommendation results.
Distributing information about the lowest price of a product over the last 30 days in the recommendation results allows the customer to get a glimpse of this detail even before entering the product card, thus increasing the customer's awareness of the value of the promotion when browsing the site in search of desired items.
To be able to create product recommendations, Synerise AI should know what products you sell. You provide this information through a product feed, which contains all the required details about products marked with special tags and parameters, allowing you to later use this data in the recommendations you create. Take a look at this article to learn more about the requirements for creating a product feed.
Since you now want to display the lowest pre-discount price of the last 30 days, all you need to do as the first step for this change is to expand your product feed with an additional attribute which will be the value of the lowest price of the last 30 days (Omnibus price).
As a next step, adjustments will be required to the recommendation frames displayed on the site. The visual display of this information can be customized in any way to suit your business needs.
Check out the following Use Case, which describes a scenario for adapting recommendations to the new price transparency rules.
The Omnibus Directive is an important legislation that has broad implications for online retailers. In order to avoid incurring penalties for violating the introduced regulations, we recommend that you comply with the new obligations as soon as possible, making sure that you follow all the new rules and policies.