Category Archives: Price Optimization

3 Important Price Optimization Lessons You Might Learn In The Strangest Places: Ask Mark Stiving

On his way to attend the Professional Pricing Society meeting in Las Vegas, Mark Stiving picked up some “principles of pricing” from a hooker who struck up a conversation with him as he walked to his hotel. No, it’s not what you think. Stiving asked the woman a few questions about her business and found out how much she knew about price optimizat...
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8 Secrets To Setting Your Competitive Retail Prices Wisely

Setting prices today is not an easy task for retailers. It wasn’t so long ago when you could simply hire a secret shopper to see what the competition was up to in your geographical area or browse a few online websites for competitive retail pricing information. Now, your retail competition is global and you have to consider many thousands of online...
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How To Use Price Optimization To Boost Total Revenue 4% & Avoid Leaving 10% Profit On The Table

Last summer, in their Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012, Gartner information technology research and advisory company found that companies successfully implementing price optimization realized improvements of 2% to 4% of total revenue or more; the ROI of the price optimization investment was typically realized in less than two years; and that price ana...
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11 Artful Ways Retailers Can Maximize Profits Using Competitive Price Monitoring Software

Competitive pricing is about creating a set of strategies to maximize your company’s profits. To make wise, low-cost, high-result pricing decisions, retailers need to use competitive price monitoring software regularly, to track and analyze competitive pricing changes, i.e. both in real-time and over time to get the true picture of the competitio...
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Why Retailers Need To Use Price Tracking Software For Rational Retail Pricing

There is so much talk about the fiscal cliff and consumer uncertainty these days. Luckily, pricing is one key lever that you can almost always pull to stabilize your business and, thankfully, price tracking software is available to aid with rational retail pricing. Remember, a 1% increase in price can lead to a 11% increase in profit, as discusse...
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Why “Goldilocks Pricing” Is Perfect Competitive Pricing Ploy: Provides Customer Choice & Retailer Profit

Editor’s Note: As we’ve written many times, customers like to feel they are in control of what is important to them. Plus, the more choices consumers have, the more likely they will choose a higher-priced item — and find the money to pay for it. (Large Assortment Choice Increases Shoppers’ Perceived High-End Quality). The findings also highlight ...
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How Retailers Can Achieve Maximum Pricing Profitability — After Seeing If Their Pricing Strategy Sucks (Video)

Many retailers are losing lots of money because they’re limiting profitability through their pricing strategies. Marketing expert, Tony Gattari of Achievers Group doesn’t mince words: A lot of businesses get the concept of pricing wrong, have the wrong view, price incorrectly, lack competitive intelligence and competitive pricing; and, in short, do...
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How Competitive Pricing & Marketing Helps Turn Perceived Value Into Revenue

Think of price as a value scorecard. Price turns perceived value into revenue. The more value you create and communicate, the higher the score. So how much can you charge for your product? You have to determine how much your competitor charges — AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY — how does your product differ from your competitor’s? (Think competitive price m...
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How Large Assortment Choice Increases Shoppers’ Perceived High-End Quality

 ”Providing a large assortment from which to choose creates the perception of higher quality and increases consumer willingness to pay for it,” write researchers, Marco Bertini of The London School of Business, and Luc Wathieu of the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, in their article: “Choice Helps High End Products, Hurts Low-E...
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The Surprising Secret to Successful Price Segmentation

Guest blogger, pricing expert and author, Mark Stiving, wrote a great post for Upstream Commerce a few days ago on How to Get Your Customers to Like Price Segmentation. Mark highlighted how price segmentation can cause more trouble than it’s worth for retailers, and discussed ways to avoid the downsides while holding onto the additional profit. ...
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10 Important Things “Retail Winners” Know About Technologies, Empowered Consumers & Product Assortment

In their recent Benchmark 2012 retail research report, “Optimizing Assortments to Reinvigorate Retail,” RSR Managing Partners Paula Rosenblum and Steve Rowen examine progress made in retail companies over the past year regarding evolving merchandising processes, technology usage, customer empowerment, importance of data analysis and forecasting, h...
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How To Get Your Customers To Like Price Segmentation

Can you charge individual customers different prices? Are you doing it? The secret is to do it in a way that they’ll like and appreciate. In 2000, Amazon.com famously did some price testing that caused customers to be quoted different prices for the same product — and got in trouble for it. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, claimed it was “random pric...
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Why Pricing Technology Tools & Assortment Solutions Are Vital For Retailers Today: Part 2

In my previous blog post, Why Pricing Right Is Vital For Retailers Today (Part 1), I discussed Retail Systems Research (RSR’s) 2011 Survey exploring the impact of price sensitivity and transparency on retailers’ price optimization strategies and tactics. Responding retailers ultimately wanted to: “Improve margins, Improve top line sales, and Cr...
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