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Australian online retailer Kogan wants its users to stop using old versions of Internet Explorer and it isn't afraid to threaten a little taxation to get there.
The company claims that it will levy a 6.8% tax on any user that attempts to checkout using Internet Explorer 7. Kogan says that keeping its website compatible with IE 7 is costing it lots of money. To offset those costs -- and encourage users to download a more up-to-date browser, Kogan says it will charge users an extra 6.8% tax -- 0.1% for each month IE 7 has been on the market.
Kogan CEO Ruslan Kogan told the BBC that "the amount of work and effort involved in making our website look normal on IE 7 equalled the combined time of designing for Chrome, Safari and Firefox."
While hate for IE 7 has never reached the levels of Internet Explorer 6, it has become a frustrating target for web developers. The browser, which was released in October 2006, has less than 5% global marketshare. IE 7 is still in use by some government institutions, but all machines running IE 7 should be capable of running the much more up-to-date IE 8.
In January, we reported that Facebook Timeline doesn't support IE 7. The WordPress team has also contemplated dropping support for IE 7.
Not a Tax, Just a PR Stunt
We can certainly appreciate that keeping websites compatible with older browsers can be an expensive and time-consuming process, but an IE 7 tax? Really?
Well, no. Despite the boisterous claims on the Kogan website, users who attempt to buy products using IE 7 won't actually be taxed.
If you visit the site using IE 7 (or in our case, set your user agent to identify as IE 7), an additional tax of 6.8% is added to each item in your cart. This tax is then carried over to the "enter your name and address" part of the checkout process.
Users Are shown a 6.8% IE 7 Tax When Adding an Item to Their Cart
The Tax is Still Shown On the Shipment Details Page
At the Actual Payment Screen, the Tax is Deducted From the Final Price
When it actually comes time to pay for your item, however, the 6.8% tax disappears. Chock this up to a PR stunt. While kind of humorous, the problem with this sort of trick is that it makes it difficult for actual shoppers to decipher how much they are being charged.
Kogan is famous for pulling these kinds of marketing stunts. In 2009, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ordered the company to modify its advertising because of potentially misleading conduct.
Kogan's blog post on the matter has already generated several thousand shares on Facebook and Twitter, with many users responding positively to the "news."
So what do you think of this marketing stunt, is it brilliant or lame? In the comments, share your thoughts.