Tag Archives: Pricing Strategy

How The Internet Sales Tax Bill Will Affect Online Competitive Pricing: Part 1

On Monday May 6, 2013, the US Senate passed a bill requiring online retailers to collect sales tax just like their brick and mortar cousins. Although the bill has to pass the House, The Marketplace Fairness Act (also called The Internet Sales Tax Bill), if passed, will seriously affect the way business is done on the internet in the future, includi...
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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 boldly decided to ask the woman a few questions about her business and found out how much she knew aboutÂ...
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Pros, Cons & Pricing Considerations Of Selling On Third Party Marketplaces

Did you know that 49% of daily searches on the web are for information on products or services? Did you know that when searching on Google and other search engines, about 25% (and growing) of listings on the first page turn out to be Third Party Marketplace listings? Did you know that over a quarter (27%) of online retail sales are coming from Thi...
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What Can We Learn From Panhandlers About The Psychology of Pricing? (Dan Ariely)

 What do panhandlers know about the psychology of pricing? Maybe more than we think. (Renowned behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, just commented on a question he received in his AskAriely@wsj.com post.  The person who wrote to Ariely said he was recently approached by a panhandler who asked him for 75 cents, and th...
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What 5 Lessons Can Retailers Learn From Barnes & Noble’s Recent Nook Decision?

We don’t know what goes on in the boardrooms when discussions take place over what to do about the future of the business… but yesterday’s article in the New York Times on Barnes & Noble’s latest efforts to set their...
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As eCommerce Sales Hit $1 Trillion In 2012, Here Are 4 Critical Pricing Strategies For Retailers In 2013

This is the time of year when ecommerce and marketing research firms tell us how we did in 2012 and offer up eCommerce predictions leading to astute pricing and assortment strategies for 2013. After reading the latest National Retail Federation, comScore and eMarketer reports, it’s clear that all signs point to a positive year ahead for eCommerce. ...
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What’s More Important To Customers: Brand Loyalty or Competitive Price? (Marketoon)

Do customers today buy for loyalty or for competitive price? That’s the essential question posed in two of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons on the subject of Brand Loyalty. The first Marketoon (1. below) shows a shopper shunning one set of Valentine’s Day products, about to buy the ones that are on sale, with the caption, “Nice try, but THAT brand is on...
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3 Cogent Competitive Strategies For Retailers Based On Barnes & Noble’s Recent Quickstep – Backwards

Over the next ten years, Barnes & Noble Booksellers anticipates closing as many as one-third of its retail stores, according to a January 28 article in the Wall Street Journal. (As of January 2013, Barnes ...
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5 Obvious Reasons Retail Winners Do Competitor Price Monitoring

As all retailers gird their loins to do serious battle for customers and sales in today’s evolving and competitive marketplace, competitor price monitoring has become indispensable as the keystone for strategic decisions regarding pricing, sales, profits, and survival. Competitor price monitoring makes the difference between making a sale and getti...
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The Simple Secret To Raising Prices 5% & Increasing Profit 50%

In the world of business, everyone loves bargains. But In the world of business today, price becomes the only thing that’s important if everything else is the same — and service may be one of the only distinctions you have to offer. Many companies compete on price because they feel they don’t have good differentiation.  Competitor price monit...
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How Retail Price Vs. Customer Expectation Triggers Buying – Or Bolting To Check Competitor Pricing

In line with recent blog posts about competitor pricing and customer buying psychology, here’s another interesting observation, from a study entitled: The Effects of Consumers’ Price Expectations on Sellers’ Dynamic Pricing Strategies. In this research paper in the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing Research, authors Hong Yuan (...
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How Retailers Can Increase Revenue 39.1% Using Decoy Pricing (Dan Ariely Video)

Renowned behavioral economist Dan Ariely returned to his roots at Duke University following stints at MIT that included tons of thought-provoking, mind-bending research on human behavior (more correctly on human irrational behavior), which has implications and value for retail competitive pricing with regard to buyer behavior. In this video on pri...
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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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