New World, Pak’nSave removes the ability for shoppers to sort items by price

“Such a move may limit options for shoppers and ultimately increase supermarkets’ profit margins at the expense of local suppliers,” Schulz said.

Consumer NZ said Foodstuffs told it it was modernizing its digital platform to improve its online shopping offering, including more transparent unit pricing. A new sorting feature will be added soon, it said.

Schulz said it was bizarre.

“This change could prevent consumers from making informed decisions about their purchases.”

Without the lowest price option available, home brands dominated search results, he said.

Marketing expert Bodo Lang, from Massey University, said he was so surprised to hear of the change that he checked it out himself.

“It’s another move that will make grocery shopping more difficult and less transparent for New Zealand shoppers.

“Although not all buyers would have used the ‘sort by price’ function, many buyers would have used it.” New Zealand’s most vulnerable shoppers will most likely be disadvantaged by the surprise removal of this feature. This restriction is likely to cause additional financial hardship for New Zealand’s most vulnerable households.”

He said it seemed against the spirit of changes such as offering unit pricing.

“Acting in the spirit of making unit prices available would have meant that supermarkets would have had to add ‘unit price’ as a sorting feature on their websites. In this context, the removal of even a basic “price sort” is extremely disappointing.

“My experience with e-commerce platforms is that even the most basic platforms can sort products by price. This suggests that Foodstuffs may have deliberately disabled this functionality.”

He said that while websites allowed shoppers to only display products on “discount”, research showed that supermarket specials were often not all that “special”.

“In other words, this feature is unlikely to show consumers the least expensive products.”

Research showed that consumers reacted “very negatively” if their choices were restricted, he said.

Foodstuffs did not respond to a request for comment from RNZ.

– RNZ

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