And yet somehow it's always possible to have the proper price ready when billing your card.
Here (Australia) if a manufacturer or dealership advertises a car at a price, they have to sell the car for that price and no more if someone shows up at your showroom. In practice this does make life complicated, I worked on Toyota's website a decade or so back, and there was a quite complex attempt to geo locate users so we could know which state they were in, because each state has different registration/insurance/on-road-costs, so depending where you were, we had to show a different final price. (It was usually only a few hundred dollars difference, and we also went out of our way to ensure we listed how much was state government fees and how much was the dealership pricing.)
(There was an "incident" before my time there, where the web agency fucked up and advertised RAV4s for way below the real price, and half a dozen people worked it out and showed up at dealerships with printouts of the web advertised price and got a RAV4 for a _lot_ below retail price. Toyota ended up making the web agency pay to difference, which was well into 6 figures. But they were getting billed close to 7 figures a month for the website, so...)
I would love such legislation to exist in the States. Netherlands has similar legislation. For a long time it’s why I used airbnb.com.au to search for listings.
It would also neatly solve the extremely annoying problem of tax not being included in the total listing.
I don’t care if it’s “hard” for sellers. There are already existing softwares like TaxJar that help with this. It should be a cost of doing business
And yet somehow it's always possible to have the proper price ready when billing your card.
Here (Australia) if a manufacturer or dealership advertises a car at a price, they have to sell the car for that price and no more if someone shows up at your showroom. In practice this does make life complicated, I worked on Toyota's website a decade or so back, and there was a quite complex attempt to geo locate users so we could know which state they were in, because each state has different registration/insurance/on-road-costs, so depending where you were, we had to show a different final price. (It was usually only a few hundred dollars difference, and we also went out of our way to ensure we listed how much was state government fees and how much was the dealership pricing.)
(There was an "incident" before my time there, where the web agency fucked up and advertised RAV4s for way below the real price, and half a dozen people worked it out and showed up at dealerships with printouts of the web advertised price and got a RAV4 for a _lot_ below retail price. Toyota ended up making the web agency pay to difference, which was well into 6 figures. But they were getting billed close to 7 figures a month for the website, so...)