Pricing Strategy Archives - PriceEdge Blog

Competitor-based pricing for eCommerce

November 26, 2020 in Blog

To succeed in eCommerce you must get your pricing right when compared to the competition. Are you taking advantage of the moment when the competition runs out of stock? Do you automatically react when your conversion figures are low? What do you do when your competitor changes their prices, whether it be an increase or decrease? How do you avoid a price war?

There are plenty of avenues to go down regarding this wide topic. In this blog post, I will limit myself to explaining a good structure for competitor based pricing for eCommerce. I will cover the steps involved as well as a few scenarios which require different configurations. Continue reading »

5 Fatal ECommerce Pricing Mistakes We See People Make

September 19, 2019 in Blog

Anyone who runs or has run any type of an eCommerce business can confirm:

Pricing can be an extremely tricky task to do right.

There are various things that eCommerce businesses need to factor into their pricing such as the value of the product, competition, and current marketing trends.

Unfortunately, many eCommerce businesses underperform because they make pricing mistakes that negatively impact their business. These mistakes result in them creating price wars and losing customers’ trust.

For this reason, we’re going to share with you 5 fatal eCommerce pricing mistakes we see people make in their business. So, you don’t have to do the same mistakes.

Let’s get to it.

How Profitable Could Your Aftermarket Business Become?

May 13, 2019 in Blog

Why implement new pricing strategies? And why even think about investing in a new pricing software? What is the purpose? Let’s be honest, it is quite simple. The purpose is to generate more profit. Period.

Sure, there are other important reasons too. For example, we all know how overpricing can hurt the long-term brand value and customer loyalty. That matters also. But without that pure financial gain, which is found through avoiding setting prices too low, it would be difficult to justify spending resources on implementing new pricing strategies.

The key question, then, is: How large a financial gain could you harvest from your aftermarket? How do you find and implement it? And how can you make that new profit level sustainable over time?

In this article, I will share my thoughts on how to answer these questions. My intention is to share what I have seen and learned during the last ten years as a pricer, a reflection of my own experience of implementing smart aftermarket pricing for multiple B2B and B2B2C companies over the years.

How do retailers price their products?

November 30, 2018 in Q&A

In my experience retailers have rather simple pricing methodologies and most of them use variants of cost+ (cost+ = taking your cost and adding a standard margin based on group/category). They manage their pricing in Excel or have built in the pricing calculation into their ERP. Few of them actually uses a price optimization tool, though it’s increasing in popularity in the last few years, especially with the growing competition from online retailers.

To dig deeper, I think a first good step is dividing the retailers into two major sub-groups: own brand sellers (H&M, IKEA, J Crew, Zara) and re-sellers (Media Markt, Bauhaus, Wall-Mart, Home-depot, Carrefour).

My Top 4 Mistakes in Aftermarket Pricing. Save Yourself Some Pain & Don’t Make Them Yourself.

November 26, 2018 in Blog

Today I would like to share some of the mistakes I have made during my years in aftermarket pricing. I hope that by reading this material, you will be able to avoid as many of them as possible. I guess I’m trying to write the text which would have helped me when I did my first aftermarket pricing project about ten years ago.

To keep it simple, I decided to make a list of criteria which I think are important if a pricing strategy is to last for a long time. I will zoom into attribute-based pricing strategies. The reason is that those usually give the best return but are also the most difficult to manage.

Before we get into this, just a short reminder that when I write “attribute-based pricing strategies”, I refer to price logic, where physical attributes, such as weight, length, power, brand, etc. are used to set the price. In a nutshell, you create groups of similar parts, and in each group you define which attributes should be used. Then you create the price equation based on those attributes. So here it is, the list of what you should try to avoid if you want your pricing strategy to pass the test of time. My hope is that you will be able to avoid most of these mistakes. Enjoy 😊

Four pricing strategies for the aftermarket

October 18, 2018 in Blog

In my career, I have been implementing pricing strategies for numerous manufacturing companies. Even though they all are unique, they usually have the following similarities in their portfolios:

They have thousands of parts

There is a mix of manufactured and purchased parts

Some of the manufactured parts are easy to copy, others are not

The cost of the manufactured parts is driven by factors not relevant to the customer; is the product in mass production? Have we switched suppliers? Are there setup costs needed to start production again? Etc.

Few parts represent the majority of sales

It’s dangerous to overprice low selling products, as one high price is enough to damage customer relations

So, how best to price such a portfolio? There are thousands of products, you cannot look at each of them individually. The cost is a terrible base for manufactured parts, pricing one too high is enough to upset and lose a customer forever.

What we have ended up implementing is a combination of strategies, all suitable for different parts of the portfolio. Let me share on a high level what these strategies are. Continue reading »

7 must read books for any pricing professional

October 17, 2018 in Blog

Do you want to learn more about pricing theory? Do you want to be inspired by examples of real-life pricing examples? Do you want to be able to create more effective pricing strategies? Or are you interested in absorbing every bit of information from authorities on pricing?

Below you find 7 pricing books handpicked by our pricing specialists which will get you a long way and that we have found extremely useful. This is far from a definitive list, of course, but it’s a great start. Continue reading »

Last Month’s Best Pricing Reads – August 2018

September 3, 2018 in Pricing Monthly

Every month the Price Edge team put together a curated list of all the must-read pricing articles picked-up from a variety of trusted online sources.

If you are curious and looking to learn more about pricing, you should be definitively read the Pricing Monthly.

Here is a list of last month’s best pricing reads:

How to build a pricing strategy in 4 easy steps

June 7, 2018 in Blog

For this blog post, we are looking at how to build a pricing strategy in 4 easy steps. We will look at what’s happening today and understand some of the reasons behind failed pricing activities, as well as explain why it’s essential for your business to have a pricing strategy.

What are the benefits of having a pricing strategy?

1. A strategy will give you a set of objectives that are aimed to achieve.

2. It will enable you to understand why you are trying to achieve these objectives.

3. The objectives will have some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) allowing you to measure and assess what you are doing.

4. It will provide clarity to your pricing and at what frequency you need to reprice.

What happens when you don’t have a strategy?

Often businesses miss out on these benefits because they jump reactively from a pricing need to pricing. The results are as follows. Continue reading »

Why You Need to Start with Your Pricing Objectives

May 15, 2018 in Blog

Learn here why pricing objectives are important, and what type of objectives are most relevant in today’s market.

Creating a pricing strategy is never an easy task. For both B2B and B2C markets, first be clear on what is your pricing “destination”. That should translate into clear, measurable business objectives. Think in terms of: “increase market share by 10%” or “increase customer satisfaction by 20%“. Sync the pricing destination with the overall business objectives of the company as pricing objectives need to work towards the business’s plans for the future. Of course, depending on the specific needs of your company, you can have multiple objectives or even change them along the way.

When choosing your pricing objectives, keep in mind that pricing is intertwined with the financial, sales, and marketing departments. Hence, your pricing objectives should relate to all 3 of these key aspects:
Continue reading »