Here’s an interesting article from the Harvard Business School newsletter on some relatively simple ways to incorporate time into Activity-Based Consting (ABC) estimates. ABC is great in theory, but getting reasonably accurate data and then keeping them up to date is a big challenge. If you can use good heuristic estimates, you can incorporate useful [...]
There’s a good series of posts on pricing segmentation in the retail sector over at B2B Blog. See Part 1 of 4 Part 2 of 4 Part 3 of 4 Part 4 coming later…
Slate had an interesting article on this topic, pondering why it took Coca-Cola 70 years to raise their prices from a nickel to a dime. One problem– they had created perpetual contracts with distributors, somehow not anticipating inflation. (The price of sugar tripled after WWI, and those were the days before high fructose corn syrup.) [...]
Many companies treat their pricing people poorly, which seems short-sighted when you consider the impact they have on the bottom line. Hopefully no one has a story that can top this.
Last fall, Wal-Mart cut the price on a Panasonic 42-inch flat screen TV below $1000. Pushing through this “magic” price-point set of a wave of price drops across the electronics retailing industry, destroying a lot of the profits in a key segment for Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, and CompUSA. This is a classic example [...]
Quasi-stealth mode startup Yapta is offering a new wrinkle on airline tickets. First, travel sites like Expedia gave buyers unprecedented visibility and power by allowing them to conveniently buy airline tickets from multiple carriers. Then sites like Farecast offered predictions of future airfares, and the ability to lock-in prices on certain flights. Now Yapta (Your [...]
A Walgreens shopper was shocked to learn that different stores charged different prices for the same item. Ketha Vinson was looking for Motrin in Cincinnati. When one Walgreens was out, she went to a different store, to find the same product at a different price. Apparently very curious, and not too worried about getting the [...]
A lot of promotions, rebates, coupons, and other discounts offer the promise of “making it up in volume.” But how reliable is this promise? In many markets, particularly those with high price elasticity (no, not every market has high elasticity), well-run discount campaigns can drive enough volume to make up for lower unit prices. One [...]
Many stores offer 30 day price protection. If you buy something and the store lowers the price within 30 days, they’ll refund the difference. The hard part was knowing when they had lowered the price. An alert reader sent a link to this TechCrunch article, describing PriceProtectr2.0. This online service which lets you enter a [...]
While you’re recovering from 4 days of eating turkey, here are some pricing leftovers: Airline PricingSlate answers the question “How do airlines set their ticket prices?” by quoting Dave Barry: “Rudy the Fare Chicken pecks at a keyboard sprinkled with corn to determine ticket prices. If Rudy is sick, he added, Conrad the Fare Hamster [...]
