Kogan Imposing Tax On Shoppers Who Use IE7



Online electronics retailer Kogan is no stranger to novel pricing approaches, but this one takes the cake: from now on, anyone who visits the Kogan site using IE7 will be charged an additional 6.8% “IE7 tax” — 0.1% for each month since the browser was released — on any purchases.

Visitors to the site who use IE7 will see a pop-up message suggesting that they install a “better browser”, with links to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (though not to IE9). In a blog post announcing the change, founder Ruslan Kogan says that the cost of making the site render properly on IE7 isn’t worth the hassle.

Microsoft itself has worked hard to persuade users to upgrade as part of general system patches, and as we’ve noted recently, the current Internet Explorer 9 release performs much better than you might think. We’re not sure how many actual customers this will impact, but driving bargain shoppers towards using a more modern browser is no bad thing. I can’t imagine anyone choosing to pay extra and sticking with IE7, but if it does happen, I’m sure we’ll hear about it.

Kogan