Mobility Scooter Price Watch

Comparing prices of mobility scooters is a notoriously difficult thing. Many manufacturer recommended retail prices are normally massively inflated to allow massive apparent discounts to consumers; products may be re-branded to make comparison shopping near impossible for most consumers; but worse than all these is the practice of hiding retail prices. Hiding retail prices has two main effects: it drives true competition out of the market by making real comparison shopping overly difficult; and it forces customers into contact with high pressure sales people. To help make things just a little bit simpler we are going to try to find the best prices on the most popular mobility scooters on the market. How are we going to do this? First of all we will collect prices from sites that actually do make their best prices freely available; then we will cross reference that with online price match services like Google merchant centre; third, we will contact a selection of sites that don’t list a price, but do give quotes by email. What we will not be doing is contacting sites that are only contactable by telephone or mail as it will be far too time consuming. The other thing we will not do is haggle. Expecting the many of the most vulnerable people in society to have to haggle for a product that is required to maintain a normal standard of living is deeply distasteful and hopefully naming and shaming these companies with their outrageous ‘opening offers’ will help to end this sharp practice. The prices initially will be broken up into seven categories; luxury scooters; travel scooters; 8 mph scooters; 6 mph scooters; 4 mph scooters; three wheel scooters; and powered wheelchairs. This is all a work in progress so please let us know what you think and if this is useful.