All the time working with websites I was wondering:
What is more preferable, customer retention or usability?

There is a hack, that some sellers, in order to keep customer on the website as long as possible and make him go through more pages – building a very inconvenient sitemap: hiding price for products and services or even removing them at all (to make client calling or writing in live chat), placing an important info such as characteristics or tariffs in the footer of website, etc.

Being a client I really hate this, when I cannot find my member’s panel, quickly check the price, see characteristics of product/service. As far as I am working in this area, I should be more experienced in how to find a specific info, but I am still convinced to uselessly walk through tons of pages.

Being a seller I am still sure that unsatisfied customer will be less motivated to buy my product after such complicated way to find info. On the other hand, some people believe that customer will regret spending too much time looking for info and will buy product just to compensate his time costs.

What do you think?