I’m a big fan of automating pricing tasks. Companies spend way too much time on mundane issues like moving pricing information from one system (or spreadsheet) to another, and far too little time really thinking strategically about price and value. A few simple automation steps can free up time and money for those strategic activities, [...]
Dell has launched a new back-to-school campaign highlighting the lower prices of of Dell laptops compared to Apple. At a high level, this is a great idea. Apple has regained a (the?) leadership position in the educational market, which is important beyond its immediate size because of its longer-term implications. Dell has invested in design [...]
We mentioned in a previous post that Microsoft is in the grips of a pricing dilemma. Changing paradigms have weakened Microsoft’s dominant position in operating systems and office productivity programs. Businesses and affluent consumers no longer upgrade regularly. What they have now is good enough. Developing markets that don’t need to maintain backwards compatibility with [...]
When commodity prices surged and governments around the world pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into markets, crippling inflation was a major risk. However, demand is so soft that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell a record 1.0% in October. With the critical holiday buying season coming up, a lot of retailers aren’t even pretending [...]
Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson recently wrote a provocatively-titled article called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Anderson argues that the economics of computing on the net, where storage and bandwidth costs fall even faster than the cost of processing power, will drive the price of many services to the marginal cost– in other [...]
Software giant Microsoft (MSFT) purchased pricing optimization software firm Rapt to help make up ground against industry leader Google. Rapt got its start trying to optimize prices for computer makers such as Sun and HP. Rapt had some good success stories and some interesting technology, although much of the benefit came from the companies getting [...]
A French court ruled that Amazon’s free shipping policy violates a law that forbids booksellers from discounting more than 5% off list price. Rather than stopping the practice, Amazon has upped the ante, continuing the policy in the face of a €1,000 per day fine, and soliciting customers to sign a petition in favor of [...]
As you may have noticed, the quantity and quality of posts has suffered since my writers have gone on strike. But like The A Daily Show, we’re back. Fittingly, when Jon Stewart returned to the studio last week, he had some things to say about pricing. The writers’ strike is mainly around residual payments on [...]
The folks over at Wrox are running a pricing experiment. They’re discounting their ebooks by 50% to see how much extra volume they get, and whether they can convert people who steal ebooks into paying customers. While this is an interesting exercise, and will hopefully give them some good data, there are a couple of [...]
In a decision that will have profound pricing impact, the Supreme Court overturned a century-old ban on restrictive pricing clauses between manufacturers and distributors or retailers. In an ideologically divided 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that the practice of producers dictating prices to business further down the channel was not longer a definitive violation [...]
