Appliance store software in Baltimore: the dryer has no yellow label and the dishwasher gets no tax holiday

A clothes dryer is the one large appliance in a Baltimore showroom that Maryland lets you sell tax-free on Presidents’ Day weekend and that federal law does not require to carry a yellow EnergyGuide label. A dishwasher is the reverse. Its label is compulsory, on the sales floor and on the website, and the tax holiday never applies to it. A freezer carries the label, never gets the holiday, and when the customer’s old one leaves the house, somebody has to sign a statement about the refrigerant inside it. A gas range carries no label, gets no holiday, and needs a licensed gas fitter to connect it.

None of these rules was written with the others in mind. The Federal Trade Commission’s label rule, Maryland’s tax holiday, the Environmental Protection Agency’s refrigerant rules, Maryland’s home-improvement and plumbing licenses and BGE’s rebate programs each sort the appliances on a sales floor into their own groups, and the groups do not line up. In a showroom, experienced staff carry the differences in their heads. On a website somebody has to write them down, because the checkout has to know that the washer and the dryer in the same pair are two different kinds of product.

That is the problem this article is about, and it is not the only one. Two other fields on an appliance product page carry more law than they appear to. The first is the price. The FTC positions its label relative to the price, manufacturers write policies about what the price may be, and Maryland, unusually, says that no manufacturer may fix a minimum resale price by agreement. The second is the delivery date. A Maryland statute that few dealers have read turns it into a written promise, with a two-week grace period and a two-week refund clock behind it.

We build custom software for small businesses in Baltimore, so my interest here is practical. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. The question I want to answer is the one every appliance dealer with a website runs into sooner or later: which facts about a product, a price and a delivery does the software have to know, and which can safely stay in the heads of the people on the floor?

What Baltimore’s appliance trade actually looks like

Start with who this is for. I took the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns for 2023, the most recent year published, and counted household appliance stores (NAICS 443141) and, for comparison, appliance repair and maintenance shops (NAICS 811412). Both counts cover businesses with at least one employee on the payroll.

Establishment counts in County Business Patterns are exact, but the Census Bureau deliberately blurs employment and payroll in small cells, and the Baltimore City cells carry its flag for a distortion of between 2% and 5%. Treat the employee and payroll figures for the city as approximate. The metro area is the Baltimore–Columbia–Towson area, and its 43 stores are exactly the sum of the city, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel, Howard, Harford and Carroll; the sixth county in the area, Queen Anne’s, has none.

Three things stand out. The first is how small these businesses are. Of Maryland’s 88 appliance stores, 79 (89.8%) have fewer than ten employees, against 71.6% nationally, and four of Baltimore City’s five have fewer than five. The second is the direction of travel. Maryland had 96 appliance stores with a payroll in 2019 and 88 in 2023, a fall of 8.3%; the country as a whole went from 6,592 to 5,433, a fall of 17.6%, a period that included the collapse of Sears Hometown, which filed for bankruptcy in December 2022. The third surprised me. Over the same years the number of appliance repair shops in the United States rose from 4,897 to 5,595, and in 2023, for the first time in the years I checked, the country had more businesses fixing household appliances than businesses selling them.

The national picture explains the pressure. OpenBrand, which tracks retail appliance sales from consumer surveys, reported for the first quarter of 2026 that Lowe’s and Home Depot together sold 77.4% of all major appliances by units. Regional and independent retailers sold 3.3% of the units and took 6.2% of the dollars. That second pair of numbers is the whole independent business model in one line: the average independent sale is roughly 1.9 times the size of the market average. That fits what independents are known for, which is the built-in refrigerator, the column freezer, the matched kitchen package, and the measuring, installing and servicing that the chains handle less well. OpenBrand also found that 75.4% of appliance purchases in the quarter were made in a store. Most appliance sales still close in person, even when they start on a screen.

So the reader I have in mind runs a store with somewhere between two and fifteen people, sells a smaller number of more expensive things than the chains, and is judged by customers on everything that happens after the price is agreed. Both the software market and the rulebook treat that store differently from the chains, as the next sections show.

The buying group has probably already built you a website

Before any argument for custom software, the fair starting point. A large share of independent appliance dealers belong to a buying group, and the groups have spent years building exactly the tools a dealer would otherwise have to buy one at a time. Nationwide Marketing Group describes itself as having more than 5,500 members operating more than 14,000 storefronts, and has folded its two website programs, Retailer Web Services and Site on Time, into a single offering it calls OneShop. Its early adopters, it said at launch, had taken more than 1,200 online orders worth more than $1.3 million between them, which works out at roughly $1,080 an order. AVB, the co-op behind BrandSource, says it has nearly 5,000 members. Retailer Web Services’ WebFronts platform advertises a normalized product database of more than a million SKUs, which is the real prize: somebody else has already typed in the dimensions, the specification sheets and, for many models, the EnergyGuide labels.

There are also systems built for the trade. HomeSource sells point-of-sale, inventory and e-commerce to appliance and furniture dealers; STORIS, PROFITsystems and Furniture Wizard are the long-established systems for furniture and appliance retail; and newer entrants such as Appliance.io and ApplianceOps sell appliance-specific point-of-sale and delivery tools. Anyone who tells an independent dealer to throw all of that away and build from scratch is selling something, and it is usually a longer project than they admit.

To see what the result looks like in practice, we tried to inspect the online catalogs of 19 independent dealers serving Baltimore City and the surrounding counties, found through ordinary web searches on 23 September 2026. The first finding was that we could not see most of them. Nine returned an HTTP 403 “forbidden” response to every route we tried, including an ordinary desktop browser, and two more did not connect at all. Five of the nine blocked stores sit on one shared hosting platform whose operator we could not identify. We ran these checks from outside the United States, so a shopper in Towson may well see a normal page. But a catalog that refuses unfamiliar visitors also refuses the price-comparison services and the AI assistants that increasingly answer “where can I buy this fridge near me?”, and a store that cannot be read cannot be recommended.

Of the sixteen sites whose platform we could identify, eight ran on dealer-specific or shared dealer hosting (WebFronts, HomeSource, Nationwide’s own platform and the unidentified shared host) and eight on general website builders: three on Shopify, two on Wix, two on Square Online and one on WooCommerce. Of the eight catalogs we could actually read, three had a working cart and checkout, and all three were on Shopify. The rest were brochures with prices, or catalogs that asked you to call. That is not a criticism. For a store whose average sale is large and whose customers want to be measured for a built-in, a phone call may be exactly the right checkout. It does mean that the question “what should our online store do?” has, for most of the independents we looked at, not really been asked yet.

What the software costs, and what the meter counts

Pricing in this trade follows a pattern I have now seen in almost every vertical we have written about. The systems built specifically for furniture and appliance dealers publish no prices at all, the general-purpose platforms publish everything, and the add-ons sit somewhere in between. On 23 September 2026 we looked for a published price from every vendor below, and wrote down what each one meters, because for an appliance store the meter matters more than the monthly figure.

Several vendors’ sites, including STORIS, Nationwide and BrandSource, refused requests from our network, so “none found” there means we could not find a price, not that none exists. DispatchTrack, a delivery platform aimed squarely at furniture and appliance retailers, sends its /pricing address to a demo-booking page. Track-POD’s /pricing/ address returns a 404 error, and its real prices sit on a page called “pricing-delivery-app,” which we found only by reading the links on its homepage. The Shopify and BigCommerce figures are their published United States prices; Shopify showed our network euros, so we read its US page from an archived copy dated 22 September.

Every meter here was designed for a smaller basket

The interesting column is the last one, and the way to read it is to put an appliance order through it. Nationwide’s own launch figures for OneShop put its members’ early online orders at roughly $1,080 each. Most e-commerce pricing was designed around baskets of clothes, cosmetics and groceries, and it shows in three places.

Per-order and per-driver meters become almost free. At Track-POD’s per-order rate, the delivery software costs about 19 cents on a $1,080 order, which is 0.02% of it; Routific charges nothing at all under a hundred orders a month. For a store that ships forty appliances a week, a route planner is a rounding error, and nobody should let a delivery-software subscription decide anything.

Sales-band plans run out fast. BigCommerce’s plans are defined by what the store sells over the trailing twelve months, and it moves a store up a plan automatically when it passes the band: $30,000 for the entry plan and $100,000 for the second. At $1,080 an order, the entry plan covers about 28 online sales a year and the second about 93. The third plan carries a monthly ceiling of $33,333 and charges 0.9% on sales above it, which at the same average is about 31 orders a month. A dealer who sells in volume online is on the expensive tier from the start, and should price it that way.

Percentage meters become the real price. Shopify charges nothing extra on orders paid through Shopify Payments, but adds 2%, 1% or 0.6% on its three standard plans to orders paid through any outside payment provider. On a $1,080 order that is $21.60 on the Basic plan, more than half of Basic’s monthly price, on a single order. Appliance dealers lean heavily on outside finance: of the nine Baltimore-area dealer websites where we could see payment options, seven offered financing and five offered lease-to-own, through Acima, Snap, Synchrony, Wells Fargo, Afterpay and Klarna. A dealer who takes a meaningful share of its web orders through a lender’s or its own processor’s checkout should check exactly which orders the fee applies to before choosing a plan. On monthly billing, and with every order paying the fee, Grow becomes cheaper than Basic above $6,600 of online sales a month, and Advanced cheaper than Grow above $73,500.

The add-ons follow the same logic. A protection-plan app that takes 7% of plan revenue on top of $249 a month, or an installation app that takes 1% of every installation order, is a small tax on the parts of the business that independents actually compete on. None of these is unreasonable on its own. Together they are why the monthly total on an appliance store’s software is always larger than the plan price on the pricing page, and why it grows with the ticket rather than with the work.

The part no national platform models: every rule sorts the showroom differently

Every e-commerce platform has a place for a product category, and every one of them treats it as navigation: a menu heading, a filter, a breadcrumb. In an appliance store the category is doing a second job that nobody wrote down. It decides which federal label the product page must show, whether the product is tax-free on one weekend in February, what paperwork the delivery crew owes when they take the old one away, and what the local utility will pay the customer. The rules that decide those things were written by different agencies, in different decades, for different purposes, and they sort the showroom differently. Here is the sorting as it stood in September 2026.

Sources: 16 CFR 305.27; Md. Code, Tax-General §11-226; 40 CFR 82.152, 82.154 and 82.155; BGE’s published programs on 23 September 2026. Refrigerant exemptions depend on what the old unit contains, which is printed on its rating plate, not on what the new one contains.

Read across the rows and the pattern is that there is no pattern. A washer and a dryer sold as a pair are treated identically by the tax holiday and differently by the label rule. A freezer and a refrigerator are treated identically by the label rule and the EPA and differently by the tax holiday. A dehumidifier, which most dealers would file under small appliances, sits in three of the four columns. The only honest way to encode this is as a property of each product type, one flag per rule, maintained in one place and inherited by every model. A category tree built for browsing cannot do it, and neither can a staff member uploading photos on a Friday afternoon.

The rest of this section takes the rules one at a time, starting with the one that reaches the product page itself.

The yellow label is pinned to the price

Every new refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, clothes washer, water heater and room air conditioner sold in the United States arrives with a yellow EnergyGuide label: the estimated yearly energy cost printed large, and a scale beneath it showing where the model sits among its competitors. The Federal Trade Commission writes the label under its Energy Labeling Rule, 16 CFR Part 305, and most dealers think of it as a sticker. The manufacturer puts it on, the store leaves it on (removing it is itself a prohibited act under §305.7(a)(2)), and the customer peels it off at home.

Online it is not a sticker. It is a layout rule. Section 305.27 says that any “manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or private labeler” who advertises a covered product on a website “in a manner that qualifies as a catalog” must show, for each model, “a recognizable and legible image of the label.” It may be a link behind a small icon the FTC supplies in Appendix L, but the link has to open the image “in a way that does not require consumers to save the hyperlinked image to view it.” And it has to appear “clearly and conspicuously and in close proximity to the covered product’s price on each Web page that contains a detailed description of the covered product and its price.” In its current form the requirement comes from an amendment published in January 2013, which gave online retailers until 15 January 2014 to replace the old text-only disclosures with the label itself, and it has been amended six times since. Publishing a catalog listing without it is a prohibited act for retailers as well as manufacturers (§305.7(b)(5)).

The penalty is set by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act at $100 per violation, and each day a listing stays wrong counts as a separate violation. After inflation adjustments the FTC’s figure is $575. It would normally have risen again in 2026, but the Commission announced on 15 September that the amounts would stay unchanged, because the 2025 government shutdown stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from producing the October 2025 inflation figure the adjustment depends on. Real settlements have been far below the theoretical maximum, but the rule is not a dead letter. In November 2010 the FTC announced its first civil penalty cases against online retailers for leaving EnergyGuide information off their websites. Three stores that also ran showrooms settled, P.C. Richard & Son for $180,000, Abt Electronics for $137,500 and Pinnacle Marketing Group for $100,000, and the agency proposed penalties of $640,000 against two more that had not.

Three details in that text matter more to a dealer’s software than the headline does.

The first is that the rule is anchored to the price. The label goes next to the price; the duty applies to pages that carry a detailed description “and its price”; and the rule’s own definition of a catalog, in §305.2(h), is material “which contains the terms of sale, retail price, and instructions for ordering, from which a retail consumer can order a covered product.” A web page that shows no price and takes no order is, on that wording, not a catalog at all. I am not suggesting anyone hide a price to get out of a labeling rule. The FTC may read it differently, and the label costs nothing to show. But it does mean that the one element the federal government positions on your product page is positioned relative to one field, and in appliances that is the field manufacturers most want to control. That is the next section.

The second is that the rule covers some categories and not their neighbors. Refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, clothes washers, water heaters, room and portable air conditioners, pool heaters, ceiling fans, furnaces, central air conditioners and televisions carry labels. Ranges, cooktops, wall ovens, microwaves and clothes dryers do not. A washer-and-dryer pair sold as a set needs one label, not two, and a four-piece kitchen package of range, refrigerator, dishwasher and microwave needs two out of four. A product database that treats “carries an EnergyGuide label” as a property of the product type gets this right by itself. One that leaves it to whoever uploads the photos will not.

The third is the one I would build around. Section 305.9 makes the manufacturer post every label on a public website “in a manner that allows catalog sellers to hyperlink to the label or download it for use in websites or paper catalogs,” but only until “six months after production of that model ceases.” The retailer’s duty has no such end. It lasts as long as the listing does. Independent dealers sell precisely the models that fall into that gap — last year’s closeouts, floor models, scratch-and-dent units — so a website that links to the manufacturer’s copy of the label will quietly lose it on the products the store is working hardest to clear. The rule itself allows downloading the label for use on your own site. The fix is a small job that copies each label into your own storage on the day a model is listed and checks, every night, that every labeled product still has one.

What 5,830 listings actually show

To see how far the label actually travels, we looked beyond Baltimore. On 23 September 2026 we read the complete public catalogs of 26 independent American appliance dealers and outlets whose stores run on Shopify, a platform that publishes each store’s catalog as a machine-readable feed: 35,115 products in all, of which 5,830 were new units of a type the FTC requires to be labeled. Only 148 of those 5,830 listings, 2.5%, mentioned or linked an EnergyGuide label anywhere in the product’s own data, and all 148 belonged to a single store. On a random sample of 194 of the product pages themselves, where themes and add-on apps can insert content that the product data does not contain, the figure rose to 22, or 11.3%. Nineteen of those 22 labels were placed on the page by a theme or an app, usually a content script from the dealer’s product-data provider, rather than by anything the store had written. And that is an upper bound, because we checked only that the label was somewhere on the page, not that it sat next to the price.

The comparison that matters is with the other things those same listings carry. The Energy Star logo, a voluntary badge that manufacturers work to qualify for and want shown, appeared on 1,286 of them, 8.7 times as often as the federal label. California’s Proposition 65 warning, which has nothing to do with Maryland but rides along in manufacturers’ descriptions because private plaintiffs enforce it, appeared on 1,176, eight times as often. The rule that emerges is one we keep finding in trade after trade: a requirement reaches a store’s product data when somebody upstream has a reason to put it there. Manufacturers want the Energy Star logo on the page, and California’s plaintiffs make sure the Prop 65 warning is. The EnergyGuide label is the retailer’s legal duty and the manufacturer’s six-month hosting chore, and in the data it mostly never arrives.

We also tested the label links we did find. Of 134 distinct label addresses, 76 sat on one large manufacturer’s website, which refused automated requests from our network, so we set them aside. Of the other 58, 48 returned a label, four returned a “not found” error and six timed out, so roughly one in six produced no label at all. All four dead links pointed at a content provider’s cached copy of the PDF rather than at the manufacturer’s original, and several live manufacturer addresses contained a date folder and a revision number, which means any revision of a label creates a new address and strands the old link. The sample is small and one store supplied most of it, so treat those figures as a warning rather than a rate. The practical conclusion does not depend on them: a label you store yourself cannot be moved, purged or revised out from under you.

The label nobody can build an app for

You might expect the e-commerce platforms to have solved this years ago. On 23 September 2026 a search of the Shopify App Store for “energyguide” returned “Sorry, nothing here,” and the WordPress plugin directory returned no results at all. There was no app or plugin that fetches the FTC label for a model and places it next to the price.

The same search for the European Union’s energy label tells the opposite story. We counted six Shopify apps that pull EU labels automatically, priced from free to $99.95 a month, and five of them have launched since September 2025. The difference is not demand. It is data. The EU requires every manufacturer to register each model in a public database, EPREL, before it can be sold, and prints a QR code linking to that record on every label. Anyone can build an app on top of that. The United States has no equivalent. Section 305.9 leaves each manufacturer to host its own labels, on its own website, in its own format, for six months after production ends. Nobody upstream has made the American label cheap to carry, so, as the census shows, it mostly is not carried.

The rule may also be about to change. A proposal the FTC published in February 2024 and has not yet finalized would give clothes dryers an EnergyGuide label for the first time (along with air cleaners, wine and beverage coolers and portable spas), make retailers responsible for making sure that every refrigerator, dishwasher, washer or dryer displayed in a showroom has one, and require the online thumbnail or icon to be “visible to the consumer without any additional scrolling, clicking, or other similar actions,” which rules out burying the label as the ninth image in a photo carousel. It also refuses to let sellers substitute “a virtual or electronic label (e.g., a QR code)” for the paper one. If it is adopted, the dryer in the first sentence of this article gets a label, and a great many product-page templates will need editing.

A second label, from a second agency

There is another label on some appliance pages that almost nobody talks about. Under the EPA’s rules for phasing down hydrofluorocarbons, the refrigerants known as HFCs, any refrigerator, freezer, air conditioner, dehumidifier or heat pump made since 1 January 2025 that uses an HFC must carry a permanent label naming the refrigerant and the year it was made (40 CFR 84.58). And for products sold online, “the label must be readily visible and legible in either photographs of the products, photographs of packaging materials that contain the required information, or an item description that contains the required information.” Most new refrigerators use isobutane, which is not an HFC, so this bites mainly on room air conditioners and dehumidifiers, many of which now use R-32. A product lacking the label is presumed to use a banned refrigerant.

Two details make this more than a footnote. The EPA’s label, unlike the FTC’s, may live anywhere in the photos or description, and it may be satisfied with a working QR code on the product, the very thing the FTC’s 2024 proposal refuses to accept in place of its paper label. Same product page, two federal agencies, two opposite answers about the same technology. And the same regulation contains a sell-by date that nobody prints on anything. Household refrigerators and freezers using an HFC with a global warming potential of 150 or more could not be made or imported after 1 January 2025, and §84.54(b) adds that three years later no one may sell them. From 1 January 2028, a new, never-installed refrigerator still charged with R-134a cannot legally be sold, even at a scratch-and-dent price. Used units and trade-ins are exempt. A dealer’s inventory system that records the refrigerant and the manufacture date for each unit on the floor will see that date coming. One that records neither will find out when somebody asks.

The warranty has to be on the page as well

The third thing federal law puts on an appliance product page is the warranty. Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act’s pre-sale availability rule, a seller of any product costing more than $15 that comes with a written warranty must make the warranty’s terms available before the sale. For online stores the rule is specific. Section 702.3(c) requires the seller to disclose, “clearly and conspicuously” and “in close conjunction to the description of the warranted product,” either the full text of the warranty or the address of the warrantor’s website where it can be read, together with a way to get a free copy. “Close conjunction,” the rule adds, means on the page that contains the description of the product. When the FTC updated the rule in 2016 it offered an example of how to do it: a clearly labeled link near the product description, “such as ‘get warranty information here.’”

This is the easiest of all the rules to meet, since manufacturers publish their warranties, and it was the least often met in our local sample. Four of the seven refrigerator pages we could read mentioned a warranty somewhere. None linked to the warranty document itself. The fix is the same shape as the EnergyGuide fix: store the document with the product type, link it next to the description, and check nightly that the link still works.

In Maryland the price field belongs to the dealer, by statute

In most retail trades the price on the product page is simply the store’s decision. In major appliances it is shared, and has been for years. Manufacturers publish two kinds of pricing policy. A minimum advertised price policy, or MAP, governs what a dealer may advertise; the dealer may still sell for less, which is why so many appliance sites say “add to cart to see price.” A unilateral pricing policy, usually called a UPP and sometimes a UMRP (unilateral minimum resale price), goes further and governs what the dealer may actually sell for. The model spread through consumer electronics after 2007 and was well established by 2012, when Samsung extended one across its televisions and home-theater lines: dealers remained free, the company told the trade paper TWICE, to sell at any price they liked, but selling below the set minimum triggered a schedule of penalties. LG’s online policy the same year threatened a temporary or permanent loss of the right to sell the products concerned, and made the minimum advertised and minimum selling prices the same number. Anyone who has priced the same premium range at three stores and found the same number three times has probably met one.

The word “unilateral” is doing legal work. In 1919, in United States v. Colgate & Co., the Supreme Court held that a manufacturer may choose whom it deals with and “may announce in advance the circumstances under which he will refuse to sell.” In 2007, in Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, it went further and held that even an agreement between a manufacturer and a retailer on minimum resale prices is not automatically illegal under federal law, but is judged case by case. A policy announced by the manufacturer and enforced by cutting off dealers, without any agreement, sits in the space Colgate protects.

Maryland answered Leegin within two years. Chapters 43 and 44 of the Laws of 2009 (Senate Bill 239 and House Bill 657), in force since 1 October 2009, added one sentence to the state’s antitrust statute, Commercial Law §11-204(b):

“For purposes of subsection (a)(1) of this section, a contract, combination, or conspiracy that establishes a minimum price below which a retailer, wholesaler, or distributor may not sell a commodity or service is an unreasonable restraint of trade or commerce.”

It has not been amended since. The consequences are not small. The Attorney General can seek a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per violation, with each day a separate violation (§11-209(a)(4)); anyone injured, including an indirect purchaser, can sue for three times their actual damages (§11-209(b)); and a willful violation is a misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $500,000 (§11-212). The state has used it. In 2016 it sued Johnson & Johnson Vision Care in Baltimore County, alleging that the company’s pricing policy for contact lenses “fixed minimum retail prices for all retail sellers”, and the case ended in 2017 with an Assurance of Discontinuance and $50,000 in civil penalties. In February 2024 the head of the Attorney General’s Antitrust Division told an American Bar Association audience that “Maryland has ongoing [resale price maintenance] investigations currently” and that enforcers look at substance, not just form. According to the law firm that reported the remarks, the state had brought only two such actions since 2009.

The key words in the statute are “contract, combination, or conspiracy.” A truly one-sided policy is none of those, which is why appliance pricing policies are written to be unilateral. Whether a particular policy stays unilateral in practice, once it has been negotiated, acknowledged, signed or enforced with a phone call, is exactly the kind of question the state says it examines for substance rather than form, and it is a question for a lawyer, not for me. What I can say is what it means for software. In Maryland, the number in the “price” field is, by statute, a number no manufacturer may bind the dealer to by agreement. The dealer may decide to follow a manufacturer’s policy anyway, for perfectly good commercial reasons, but the decision is the dealer’s, and the records should show that it was.

Two price fields, one calendar, and a $3 app

In practice that means an appliance store’s product data needs at least two prices, not one: the price the store will advertise and the price at which it will sell. It needs to know where each came from, meaning which manufacturer policy, in which version, effective on which date. And it needs a calendar, because manufacturers relax their policies around promotions. Samsung told TWICE in 2012 that it had already been running its policy on Black Friday promotional models during Thanksgiving week for two years, and the appliance trade now organizes much of its year around holiday sale windows such as Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Black Friday, with manufacturers’ promotional pricing moving in step. A spreadsheet can hold one price per model. It cannot hold two prices, a source and a validity window without somebody eventually making a mistake on the Friday a promotion starts.

The software market has built the cheap half of this. Shopify’s own filter for apps that hide prices lists 191 of them, and two are named for MAP compliance: one for $2.99 a month and one for $10.55. Manufacturers, meanwhile, pay for the other side. Prisync, which sells price and MAP monitoring, charges $99 to $799 a month; Price2Spy’s page titled “Price plan comparison” lists three plans and not a single dollar figure; and TrackStreet’s /pricing address returns a 404. The dealer hides a price for $3 a month, and the manufacturer pays a hundred dollars or more to watch it.

One more connection is worth making, because it links this section to the last one. The FTC positions the EnergyGuide label relative to the price, and a MAP policy is a reason to move the price off the product page. The Commission has not said how the two rules interact when the price appears only in the cart, and I would not want to be the store that finds out. The safe design is the simple one: the label goes on the product page whether or not the price does. Of the seven local refrigerator pages we could read, five showed a price and two asked the customer to call or visit; none used “see price in cart” messaging at all.

In Maryland the delivery date is a written promise

If the price is the field manufacturers care about, the delivery date is the one customers care about, and Maryland has a statute about it that I had never seen quoted in any article about appliance software. Commercial Law Title 14, Subtitle 18, headed simply “Merchandise Delivery,” applies to any “dealer,” meaning a person “who engages in the business of selling or leasing household goods to consumers residing in Maryland,” and it defines a household good as “any article or set of articles used to furnish or supply a residential dwelling such as a sofa, cabinet, rug, carpeting, washing machine, refrigerator, television, dining room set, or range” (§14-1801). Washers, refrigerators and ranges are named in the definition itself.

Under §14-1802, when a consumer orders a household good, the dealer must provide “an estimated delivery date written clearly and conspicuously on any document evidencing the agreement of sale,” together with a notice in bold type of at least 10 points, in substantially the statute’s words, telling the buyer that if the dealer fails to give an estimated date, or fails to deliver “within 2 weeks of the estimated delivery date,” the buyer may cancel and receive a full refund or a credit for the deposit, choose another product, or negotiate a new date. Under §14-1803, a refund must be paid within two weeks of the customer’s request, and the dealer may ask for that request in writing on “a dealer’s self-addressed postcard,” which tells you roughly when the law was written. Failing to comply is an unfair or deceptive trade practice under the Consumer Protection Act (§14-1804), and a court may award the customer attorney’s fees (§14-1805).

The most interesting sentence in the subtitle is the one that says how the estimate must be made. Section 14-1802(b):

“The estimated delivery date shall take into account the manufacturer’s or supplier’s instructions, recent delivery experience with the manufacturer or supplier, and the dealer’s own delivery schedules.”

That is a specification. It names three inputs, and a store that writes “usually ships in two to three weeks” on every page is using none of them. The supplier’s instructions are the date the distributor gives when the order is placed. Recent delivery experience means history: how late that supplier has actually been, lately, on orders like this one. The dealer’s own schedule means the delivery calendar, including the days the truck already has no room. Maryland wrote into statute, long before anyone sold software for “promise date accuracy,” what a delivery estimate should be calculated from.

The exceptions are just as specific, and each one needs a record. The customer loses the remedies if a delivery “prearranged between the dealer and the consumer” failed “due primarily to the conduct of the consumer” and the dealer then gave notice of the attempt; if the notice was oral, “the dealer shall record in writing, the date and time of the notification and the signature of the person who made the notification” (§14-1803(d)(1)). The remedies also do not apply to a delay caused by a strike, by an act of God, or by a supplier’s failure to deliver when the dealer tried in good faith to cancel its own order and could not, in which case the dealer must “promptly inform the consumer of the delay and provide the consumer written notice of a new estimated delivery date which may not exceed any delay caused by” that event (§14-1803(d)(2)). In other words, a revised date must be justified by the size of the upstream delay, and the dealer must be able to show that it was.

Even the customer’s notice has a hidden condition. The statutory wording ends: “The dealer is not required to allow you to exercise these rights if the dealer cannot cancel the order with the manufacturer or supplier.” Whether the customer can cancel depends on whether the dealer could cancel upstream, which the customer cannot see and the dealer’s software usually does not record. A purchase-order line with a “cancel by” date answers that question in one field.

Two honest caveats. The definition excludes “any article ordered by mail” and any article the customer takes home on the day of the order. Whether an order placed on a website counts as “ordered by mail” is a question the statute, written for paper order forms, does not answer, and I am not aware of a court that has. A cautious dealer will assume the subtitle applies to web orders delivered by its own trucks, which describes most appliance deliveries. And web orders shipped by carrier fall under the FTC’s Mail, Internet or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule as well, with its own 30-day and 50-day clocks, which we covered in our article on furniture stores. Either way, the practical answer is the same. The estimated delivery date belongs on the order confirmation, calculated from real inputs, with every revision, missed attempt and customer call recorded against it.

After the cart: installation, haul-away and the tax on each line

Independents compete on everything that happens after the price is agreed, so this is where their online store should be strongest. It is also where Maryland law is densest. Of the eight local dealer catalogs we could read, only one published the price of those services in dollars, and it did it properly: 37 priced installation and removal items, from $170 to install a 30-inch range and $180 to install an under-counter refrigerator to $220 to haul away an old built-in refrigerator and $480 to install a column unit. One more said its prices included installation. The other six left the customer to ask.

The install checkbox can be a licensed trade

“Add installation” looks like a service line. In Maryland it can be a license. The definition of home improvement in Business Regulation §8-101(g)(2)(iii) expressly includes the “connection, installation, or replacement, in the building or structure, of a dishwasher, disposal, or refrigerator with an icemaker to existing exposed household plumbing lines.” Doing that work, or selling it, requires a license from the Maryland Home Improvement Commission (§8-301), unless the person holds a plumbing or HVAC license and is acting within it. If the job “requires alteration of the plumbing lines,” it stops being home improvement under §8-101(g)(3)(iii) and becomes plumbing, which needs a plumber licensed by the State Board of Plumbing. Connecting a gas range or a gas dryer is different again: “the installation … of piping, gas-fired equipment, appliances, or appurtenances” downstream of the gas utility’s point of delivery is “natural gas services” under Business Occupations §12-101(m), and requires a gas fitter licensed by the same board (§12-301(a)(4)). Maryland does have a narrower “appliance installer” license, but the exemption for it in §12-301(g) applies only in Allegany, Frederick, Garrett and Washington counties, not in Baltimore.

So the same checkbox means four different things depending on the product and the kitchen. For a freestanding electric range it is a delivery crew plugging in a cord. For a refrigerator with an icemaker it is licensed home-improvement work. For a gas range it is licensed gas fitting. For a dishwasher going where there was none it is probably plumbing. The software consequence is that installation cannot be one product with one price. It has to be a set of services tied to product types and site conditions, each assigned to a crew that holds the right license, with the license number on the work order. We wrote about the Home Improvement Commission’s other rules, including its limits on deposits, in our article on home improvement contractors, and they apply to a dealer selling licensed installation too.

Haul-away is a disposal chain with paperwork

Taking the old appliance away is one of the services customers ask about most, judging by the questions they type into search engines, and it has the most rules behind it. When the old unit is a refrigerator, freezer, room air conditioner or dehumidifier, federal law treats it as a “small appliance” containing refrigerant, and whoever takes “the final step in the disposal process,” typically the scrap recycler, must either recover the refrigerant or verify that someone else did, “using a signed statement or a contract” (40 CFR 82.155). The statement must include “the name and address of the person who recovered the refrigerant and the date the refrigerant was recovered,” and the recycler keeps it for three years. The EPA’s own guidance, updated in March 2026, says it “does not mandate or accept a sticker as a form of verification,” which rules out the familiar “Freon removed” sticker as proof of anything. Whether any of this applies depends on what the old unit contains: refrigerators and freezers running on isobutane or propane, and room air conditioners running on propane, are exempt from the whole subpart. The refrigerant is printed on the unit’s rating plate, which makes it a field the delivery crew can photograph at pickup.

There is a local layer too. Baltimore City’s Health Department requires a waste hauler license for anyone who contracts “with others for the collection, transportation, or disposal of solid waste,” at $35 a year per truck of 7,000 pounds or less and $100 for heavier trucks, and a dealer that charges for haul-away should ask whether that includes it; we covered the license in more detail in our article on dumpster rental and junk removal. City residents can also put out up to three bulk items a month, appliances included, by calling 311 at least four working days ahead.

And there is a competitor nobody in the trade mentions. BGE, through its EmPOWER Maryland programs, pays its customers $50 to collect an old, working refrigerator or freezer of 10 to 30 cubic feet, free of charge, and $25 for a working dehumidifier, or for a room air conditioner or mini fridge picked up at the same time. The catch is in the small print: “Our crews cannot disconnect the water line,” the unit must work, and an adult must be present for a pickup from inside the home. A dealer charging $50 or more to haul away a working refrigerator is, in effect, charging the customer to give up a $50 check. The honest checkout offers both: haul-away with the delivery, or a note that the old unit may be worth $50 from BGE if it still runs and someone can disconnect the water line.

What Maryland taxes on each line

Maryland’s 6% sales tax applies to the appliance, and whether it applies to everything else on the invoice depends on how the invoice is written. Tax-General §11-101(l)(3) excludes from the taxable price a charge “stated as a separate item” for delivery directly to the buyer and for “labor or service for application or installation.” The Comptroller’s regulation, COMAR 03.06.01.08, adds the condition that matters to software: the charge must be “clearly identified with the consideration stated separately from any other item by documentary evidence in existence and made known to the buyer at the time of sale.” A delivery fee that appears only on the final invoice, or an installation price folded into a “delivered and installed” package price, does not qualify.

Two lines deserve a comment. Assembly and “dealer preparation” are taxable even when itemized, so a line called “setup” can cost the customer 6% more than an identical line called “installation,” depending on what it actually covers. And we found no statute, regulation or Comptroller publication that says anything about haul-away. It is not on the list of exclusions, which suggests it is part of the taxable price when charged as part of the sale, but that is my reading, not the Comptroller’s. A dealer with a lot of haul-away revenue should ask for a ruling. In all of these cases the tax is decided by a checkout that shows each line separately before the customer pays, and records that it did.

The protection plan is not insurance in Maryland

Extended warranties are the other big add-on, and Maryland regulates them more lightly than many states do, in the Commercial Law Article rather than the Insurance Article. Under the Maryland Service Contracts and Consumer Products Guaranty Act, a service contract is a contract “for a separately stated consideration for a specific duration” to repair, replace or maintain a product (§14-401(k)), and providers and sellers of contracts that comply “need not comply with any provision of the Insurance Article” (§14-409(b)). There is no registration with the Insurance Administration. There are, however, duties with clocks attached. The contract must be in writing and state its duration, price, exclusions, claim procedure and cancellation terms (§14-403(b)). A customer may cancel within 20 days and get the full price back if no claim has been made; the refund is due within 45 days; and a provider that pays late owes an extra 10% of the price for each month of delay (§14-403(d)–(g)). If the provider fails to perform, the contract “is extended automatically” (§14-404(b)(2)).

The platforms that sell plans through online stores describe their economics less clearly than the statute does. One Shopify app that lets a store sell plans in its own name publishes its terms, $249 a month plus 7% of plan revenue or $999 plus 4%, but among the apps that attach an insurer’s plan to the cart, the ones we read said only that the merchant “gets a commission” or that the platform charges “a variable commission per warranty.” None we found published the rate or, just as important, who the obligor is, meaning which company is legally responsible for honoring the plan. For a Maryland dealer that is the first question to ask, because the 20-day and 45-day clocks run against whoever that is.

A tax holiday keyed to a federal logo that is changing hands

Maryland has two sales-tax holidays, and they are easy to confuse. Shop Maryland Tax-Free Week in August covers clothing, footwear and backpacks, which we wrote about in our article on clothing boutiques. The one that matters here is Shop Maryland Energy, and it falls on Presidents’ Day weekend. Tax-General §11-226 has set it, since 2011, as “the Saturday immediately preceding the third Monday in February through the third Monday in February each year.” In 2026 it ran from 12:01 a.m. on Saturday 14 February to 11:59 p.m. on Monday 16 February; in 2027 it will run from 13 to 15 February.

What it exempts is defined in one sentence. An “Energy Star product” means “an air conditioner, clothes washer or dryer, furnace, heat pump, standard size refrigerator, compact fluorescent light bulb, dehumidifier, boiler, or programmable thermostat that has been designated as meeting or exceeding the applicable Energy Star efficiency requirements developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Department of Energy.” Solar water heaters are exempt the same weekend. Dishwashers, freezers, ranges and compact refrigerators are not on the list, however efficient they are, and two of the items that are on it have aged badly: the EPA retired its Energy Star specification for light bulbs at the end of 2024, and the program now certifies “smart” thermostats rather than merely programmable ones.

The larger issue is the phrase at the end. The exemption exists only for products “designated” by the EPA and the Department of Energy, and the program behind that designation is in the middle of moving. In 2025 the EPA proposed a reorganization that would have eliminated the office running Energy Star. Congress instead funded the program for fiscal 2026, requiring “not less than $33,024,000” for it in the appropriations law signed on 23 January 2026. On 3 March 2026 the EPA and the Department of Energy signed an agreement under which “DOE will be the lead Federal agency for the ENERGY STAR® Program,” and the transition plan finalized on 28 August 2026 gives the handover twelve months, with the program’s IT systems moving before July 2027. Certification continues in the meantime. Nothing in §11-226 or in the Comptroller’s regulation says what happens to the tax holiday if the designation changes hands, changes criteria or stops. A Maryland retailer’s product data should therefore record which products were certified, by whom and under which specification version, on the date of each sale, because that is the fact the exemption turns on.

The date of payment decides the tax

The Comptroller’s rules add a second condition that trips up online sales. Under COMAR 03.06.01.44, an order placed during the weekend may be delivered later if “the contract of sale and payment” take place in the period, and for internet sales the vendor must have “taken action to immediately fulfill the order.” The Comptroller’s 2026 FAQ is blunter: “Transactions for back-ordered products where the buyer is not billed until the product ships do not qualify for the exemption.” A dealer that authorizes a card on Saturday and captures payment when the refrigerator arrives in March has, on that reading, lost the exemption for its customer. Exchanges have their own rule: swap a tax-free washer for the same washer after the weekend and no tax is due; take credit toward a different model and the new one is taxed in full. Vendors must keep records identifying each exempt item for four years (COMAR 03.06.01.44B(4)).

None of this is exotic, but every piece of it is a field or a rule in the checkout: an Energy Star flag and certification reference on each model, a product-type list that matches the statute rather than the category tree, a payment-capture policy for the weekend, and an exchange rule that compares models rather than prices. A tax engine can apply the holiday if every product is mapped to the right tax code, but it cannot know whether a particular model was certified that weekend or when the store actually captured the payment; those facts live in the store’s own systems. Without them, the fallback is somebody switching tax off by hand on Saturday morning and remembering to switch it back on Tuesday.

The rebates route around independents

Rebates are the other way customers save on efficient appliances, and in Baltimore they mostly bypass independent dealers. BGE’s EmPOWER Maryland programs offer up to $1,600 on a heat-pump water heater, instantly “online or in-store at Lowe’s or The Home Depot,” and by mail-in application everywhere else, and a $50 instant discount on Energy Star dehumidifiers that is “only available” at those same two chains. BGE lists no rebate at all on refrigerators, washers or dryers. The federal Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, which covered heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters, ended for property placed in service after 31 December 2025 under the July 2025 reconciliation law. And the federal Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates, which would pay up to $840 toward an electric range or heat-pump dryer and $1,750 toward a heat-pump water heater for qualifying households, had still not launched in Maryland as of the Maryland Energy Administration’s June 2026 update. For an independent, the useful software here is modest: know which rebates each model qualifies for, say so on the product page, and generate the paperwork for the mail-in route so the customer does not have to.

A note for readers in Lithuania

We write mostly for Baltimore, but part of our team and many of our readers are in Lithuania, and the comparison is instructive, because the European Union solved two of the problems in this article differently, and one of them better.

The label first. The EU rule is almost the same as the American one in spirit. Regulation (EU) 2017/1369 requires a dealer to display the energy label “in a visible manner, including for online distance selling,” and the product-specific rule for refrigerators, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/2016, says the label “shall be shown on the display mechanism in proximity to the price of the product.” It may be shown as a “nested display”: a colored arrow carrying the efficiency class, with the letter in white “in a font size equivalent to that of the price,” linked to the full label and to a product information sheet. The difference is the database. Every model must be registered in the EU’s public EPREL database before it is sold, and every label carries a QR code pointing to that record, so a web shop can fetch the label, the arrow and the sheet by model number. That is why six Shopify apps exist for the EU label and none for the American one. On one of Lithuania’s largest web shops, the arrow next to the price links straight to the model’s EPREL page. On the same product page, a frequently-asked-questions block describes the same refrigerator by its pre-2021 class, “A++,” while the arrow says E, which is exactly the kind of mixed message the regulation’s ban on confusing extra marks is aimed at. Structured data solves the placement problem; it does not solve old copy.

The old appliance second. In Baltimore, haul-away is a fee line, sometimes $50, sometimes $220, arguably taxable and backed by EPA paperwork. In Lithuania it is a legal duty. The Waste Management Law, Article 34¹, requires distributors to accept household electrical and electronic waste free of charge when it is of the same kind as the equipment they sell, and paragraph 22 extends the duty to distance sellers: an online shop must let the buyer hand over the old appliance where the new one is received or collected, and must explain how in a clearly visible place on its website. In practice the large shops outsource it. One lets the buyer book free removal in the cart and has a producer compliance scheme collect the old unit separately from the delivery; another asks customers to bring old equipment to one of its 37 stores. The cost is real, but it is paid by producers through their compliance schemes and shown to the customer only if the producer asks for it (Article 34¹(21)).

The third difference is newer, and it points in the direction American law has not gone. Lithuania transposed the EU’s right-to-repair directive, Directive (EU) 2024/1799, through two laws adopted on 26 March 2026 and in force since 31 July 2026. For washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and dryers, the manufacturer must repair on request, for free or a reasonable price. And under the amended Civil Code, Article 6.364, if a consumer chooses repair over replacement, the seller’s two-year liability is extended once by a year; the seller’s duty to repair or replace an installed appliance now expressly includes taking it out and installing the repaired or replacement unit. As Eimantas Čepas of the law firm AVOCAD put it in comments published by LRT, „taisymas ne tik pašalina defektą, bet ir prailgina pardavėjo atsakomybės laikotarpį“: a repair not only removes the defect, it extends the seller’s liability period. He added that sellers would have to look much harder at how they run and document warranty service.

For a Lithuanian e-shop that means the guarantee clock is no longer a fixed date on the receipt but a record that changes with every repair, which is the same lesson as Maryland’s delivery statute in another form. For a Baltimore dealer it is a reminder of which way the wind blows. The United States now has more appliance repair businesses with a payroll than appliance stores, and a store that keeps a proper record of every serial number it sold, every installation and every service call will be ready for whatever rules arrive, and useful to its customers in the meantime.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For an appliance dealer they map onto the problems in this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none of them replaces a buying group’s product feed or a working point-of-sale system; the demos page shows what the finished work looks like. The honest case for building is not that a subscription is expensive. At $39 to $399 a month, the platforms in this article are cheap. The case is that the expensive things in an appliance store happen in places no subscription reaches.

Here is one worked example, with the assumption stated. Maryland’s appliance stores paid $55,982 per employee in 2023, which is about $26.91 an hour over a 2,080-hour year, so a two-person delivery crew costs about $54 an hour in wages alone, before the truck, the fuel and the payroll taxes. Suppose a store makes 150 deliveries a month and one in twenty fails for a reason the order could have caught: a gas range booked with a crew that has no gas fitter, an icemaker line with no shut-off valve, a customer who was never told the window. At an hour and a half per wasted run, that is 90 failed runs a year and roughly $7,300 in crew wages, more than the starting price of an Online Store, before counting the second trip, the customer who cancels under §14-1803 or the Saturday the truck could have spent on a paying job. Change the assumptions and the number moves, but the shape does not: the money is in the delivery, the installation and the paperwork, not in the software license.

What we would build for a Baltimore appliance dealer

If a Baltimore appliance dealer asked us to fix the problems in this article without replacing anything that already works, this is what we would build, roughly in this order.

• A product-type rules table. One row per product type, one column per rule: FTC label, EPA refrigerant label, Energy Star weekend eligibility, installation license, refrigerant paperwork on haul-away, BGE programs. Every model inherits its type’s flags, and the website, the point of sale and the delivery board all read the same table.
• A label and warranty archive. A copy of each model’s EnergyGuide label and warranty document in your own storage, placed next to the price and the description on the product page, with a nightly check that every covered product still has both. It outlives the manufacturer’s six-month hosting duty and the content provider’s cache.
• Two prices and a calendar. An advertised price and a selling price for each model, each tied to the manufacturer policy and version it came from and the dates it is valid, plus the Energy Star certification and specification version on the day of each sale.
• A delivery promise Maryland would recognize. An estimated delivery date calculated from the supplier’s date, that supplier’s recent lateness and your own truck calendar, printed on the order confirmation with the statutory notice, and every revision, missed attempt and customer call recorded against it, with the date, time and name the statute asks for.
• Installation as licensed services. Separate services for plug-in, icemaker, dishwasher, gas and plumbing work, each tied to product types and site conditions and assignable only to a crew that holds the right license, with the license number on the work order.
• Haul-away records and tax-correct lines. A photo of the old unit’s rating plate at pickup, the refrigerant statement that goes with it to the recycler, and invoice lines for delivery, installation, haul-away and protection plans that are stated separately before the customer pays, with the BGE option shown whenever it would save the customer money.

None of that is exotic engineering. It is mostly a well-designed table, three or four scheduled jobs and a checkout that knows what the showroom staff already know. That is why, as far as we could find, nobody sells it: it is too specific to one trade in one state to be a product, and too important to leave in a spreadsheet.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most appliance dealers should buy most of their software. If you belong to a buying group and its website program works for you, keep it, and ask it four questions: does it store the EnergyGuide label itself or link to the manufacturer’s copy, does it link each product’s warranty document, how does it calculate a delivery date, and does it separate delivery, installation and haul-away on the order before payment? If you sell mostly in person, do not build an online checkout for $3,000 refrigerators just because the platforms make it easy; build the delivery promise and the records first, because those help every sale, wherever it closes. If you already sell online on Shopify, as many outlet and scratch-and-dent dealers do, keep Shopify and add the rules table, the label archive and the delivery logic to it, rather than migrating.

Leave alone the things that are cheap and work: route planning at a few cents an order, a point-of-sale system your staff already knows, a finance partner your customers use. Build the things nobody sells, which in this trade are the product-type rules, the stored labels and warranties, the Maryland delivery promise and the paperwork after the cart. And if you are not sure which group a problem falls into, a one-week prototype is the cheapest way to find out.

Questions appliance dealers ask us

Do online appliance stores have to show the EnergyGuide label?

Yes, for covered products, if the website shows a price and lets customers order. Under the FTC’s Energy Labeling Rule, 16 CFR 305.27, any retailer that advertises a covered product on a website that qualifies as a catalog must show, for each model, a recognizable and legible image of the EnergyGuide label, or a link to it through the FTC’s icon, clearly and conspicuously and in close proximity to the price. Retailers have had to show the label image since 15 January 2014. Each listing without it can be a separate violation for every day it stays up, and the penalty per violation is $575.

Which appliances need an EnergyGuide label online, and which do not?

Refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers, freezers, dishwashers, clothes washers, water heaters, room and portable air conditioners, pool heaters, ceiling fans, furnaces, central air conditioners, heat pumps, televisions and some light bulbs need one. Clothes dryers, ranges, cooktops, wall ovens, microwaves and dehumidifiers do not. A proposal the FTC published in February 2024, not yet final, would add labels for dryers, air cleaners, wine and beverage coolers and portable spas.

Can a manufacturer set the price I sell at in Maryland?

Not by agreement. Since 1 October 2009, Maryland Commercial Law §11-204(b) has said that a contract, combination or conspiracy that sets a minimum price below which a retailer may not sell is an unreasonable restraint of trade, which makes such agreements illegal in Maryland even though federal law judges them case by case after the Supreme Court’s 2007 Leegin decision. A manufacturer may still announce a one-sided pricing policy and decline to supply dealers who do not follow it, which is why appliance policies are called unilateral. Whether a particular policy has become an agreement is a question for a lawyer.

Why do appliance websites say “see price in cart”?

Usually because of a manufacturer’s minimum advertised price policy, which limits the price a dealer may advertise but not the price at which it may sell. Showing the lower price only in the cart lets the dealer sell below the advertised minimum without advertising it. A stricter policy, often called a UPP or UMRP, sets a minimum selling price instead, and then the policy covers the cart price too. Because the FTC positions the EnergyGuide label next to the price, a store that hides the price should still show the label on the product page.

Is appliance delivery or installation taxable in Maryland?

Not if it is stated separately. Maryland Tax-General §11-101(l)(3) excludes from the 6% sales tax a separately stated charge for delivery directly to the buyer and for installation labor, and COMAR 03.06.01.08 requires the separate charge to be shown to the buyer at the time of sale. A price that includes delivery or installation is taxable in full, and assembly or dealer preparation is taxable even when itemized. An optional, separately stated protection plan is not taxable. We found no guidance on haul-away fees.

When is Maryland’s Energy Star tax-free weekend, and what does it cover?

It runs from the Saturday before the third Monday in February through that Monday: 14 to 16 February in 2026, and 13 to 15 February in 2027 (Tax-General §11-226). It exempts Energy Star certified air conditioners, clothes washers and dryers, furnaces, heat pumps, standard-size refrigerators, compact fluorescent bulbs, dehumidifiers, boilers and programmable thermostats, plus solar water heaters. Dishwashers, freezers and ranges are not included. It is separate from Maryland’s August tax-free week for clothing and footwear.

Does the Maryland tax-free weekend apply to online purchases?

Yes, if the order is placed and paid for during the weekend and the seller acts immediately to fill it, according to the Comptroller’s 2026 guidance and COMAR 03.06.01.44. Delivery may come later. But a back-ordered product for which the buyer is not billed until it ships does not qualify, so a store that only captures payment on delivery can lose the exemption for its customer. No exemption certificate is needed, and both seller and buyer must keep records for four years.

Does Maryland require an appliance store to give a delivery date?

Yes. Under Commercial Law §14-1802, a dealer selling household goods such as washing machines, refrigerators and ranges must write an estimated delivery date on the sales document and include a bold notice explaining the customer’s rights. If the dealer gives no date, or delivers more than two weeks after it, the customer may cancel for a full refund or credit, choose another product or agree a new date, and a refund is due within two weeks of the request (§14-1803). The estimate must take into account the supplier’s instructions, recent experience with that supplier and the dealer’s own delivery schedule.

Who can install a dishwasher or a gas range in Maryland?

Connecting a dishwasher, a disposal or a refrigerator with an icemaker to existing exposed plumbing lines is home improvement under Business Regulation §8-101(g)(2)(iii), so a business doing it for customers needs a Maryland Home Improvement Commission license, unless it holds a plumbing license. If the plumbing lines have to be altered, the job is plumbing and needs a licensed plumber. Connecting a gas range or gas dryer is natural gas work under Business Occupations §12-101(m) and needs a gas fitter licensed by the State Board of Plumbing.

Who picks up old refrigerators in Baltimore?

Several people will, on different terms. Most appliance dealers will haul away the old unit when they deliver a new one, usually for a fee. BGE’s appliance recycling program collects an old refrigerator or freezer of 10 to 30 cubic feet for free and pays its customer $50, provided the unit works and the water line has been disconnected. Baltimore City residents can also put out up to three bulk items a month, including appliances, by calling 311 at least four working days ahead. Whoever takes it, federal rules require the refrigerant to be recovered, or its recovery verified in writing, before the unit is scrapped, unless it runs on isobutane or propane.

What is the best software for an appliance store?

For most independents, the buying group’s website program or a platform such as Shopify, together with a point-of-sale system built for furniture and appliance retail, and a cheap route planner. None of those handles the parts that are specific to the trade and to Maryland: the product-type rules behind the EnergyGuide label and the tax holiday, stored labels and warranties, the estimated delivery date the state requires, licensed installation and haul-away records. That is where a small custom build pays for itself, alongside the software you already have rather than instead of it.