Switching Costs

What Does Switching Costs Mean?
The negative costs that a consumer incurs as a result of changing suppliers, brands or products. Although most prevalent switching costs are monetary in nature, there are also psychological, effort- and time-based switching costs.

Investopedia explains Switching Costs
Sustainable companies usually try to employ strategies that incur some sort of high cost in order to dissuade customers from switching to a competitor's product, brand or services. For example, many cellular phone carriers charge very high cancellation fees for canceling a contract. Cell phone carriers do this in hopes that the costs involved with switching to another carrier will be high enough to prevent their customers from doing so.