Earlier this morning a retailer in Australia said that it was going to start charging a tax to IE7 users for the increased development costs to support that browser on their website. The Internet flocked to the website to see if the tax was true and upon first glance, it does look like the site is trying to screw-over IE7 users.
The funny thing about this is that Kogan.com looks like crap in IE7, so what exactly are they paying for? If their devs are being paid extra to make sure the site looks respectable in IE7, they are obviously doing a terrible job and are getting paid to do nothing; sign us up for that gig! When we actually tried to buy something to see if the tax was actually applied to the good, we got a different story.
Quality site rendering in IE7 which Kogan claims it paid its devs extra to achieve compliance.
When you add the item to your cart, you can see that the $639.00 item quickly jumps up to $682.45, this number is supposed to be the new price of the item + IE7 tax. It does look like the company is charging the tax, that is until you actually try to pay for the good.
Item in cart showing higher price
When you move to the next stage and enter your Paypal information (we tried to enter our credit card information but the site would not render correctly, so much for those additional developer fees) the price drops back down to its pre-IE tax level.
The site adds in the shipping charge but you can clearly see the original price of $639.00 and the IE tax is suddenly gone. What it comes down to is that this was a marketing stunt to get folks to check out the Kogan website, which admittedly, they have succeeded in doing. But as for the actual tax being applied? That"s another story.