Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
This requires constant monitoring and frequent price changes. This could annoy customers when they suddenly have to pay $5 more than they would have yesterday. Or didn't save $5 by waiting a day.
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Monitoring yes; price changes no.
Really, it's no big deal.
Amazon (like the supermarkets) know how many customers they have, what they buy, and how much a given product will sell at a given price. *That* is their competitive advantage and the reason they don't brag about their user base or how many ebooks they sell. So when they put an ebook on sale (which they are doing even as we speak) they have a very good idea of how it is going to sell.
As for annoying customers, well; the current "100 books..." section of the Kindle store hasn't annoyed anybody.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...d_i=1286228011
Neither has Amazon's Daily Deal promotions in the Kindle and Android Apps stores; what they *do* achieve is getting customers used to checking out the deals every day. Truly evil, huh?
Modern consumers are used to the concept of weekly sales and even one-day sales (Amazon owns Woot!, remember). Amazon customers are familliar with their Gold Box *hourly* deals.
Honest, consumers understand the idea of promotional deals: there are literally dozens of "Daily deal" sites devoted to passing on word of worthy deals. They get that it's a lottery; that regular visits to the website will bring worthy deals. And in the process, they are exposed to *other* not-so-heavily discounted books to buy.
It is called drawing traffic.
These are *old* ideas and marketting tricks that go back to the last century; *everybody* uses them... except old school booksellers. Only in the publishing business do you find such fierce resistance to tried and true (and profitable) techniques. Only in bookselling do you find traditionalists who pretend books aren't *products* and who still follow the old 19th century merchant model of eternal list price with the retailer making the *same* flat rate markup on *every* item. That is why they like the Agency model; even without the conspiracy, it guarantees the same margin on every item sold so it allows them to just unbox, stock, sell, and count the profits. Just like in the good old days.
Simple.
Simplistic.
Lemonade stand thinking applied to big business; what you might expect from the lazy and unimaginative.
Modern retailers are perforce operating under more sophisticated rules than a lemonade stand and they are used to playing games with prices to maximize their profit by maximizing volume instead of trying to bleed each customer til they squawk. Maximizing volume allows them to distribute their fixed costs over a larger number of transactions, which allows for lower pricing, which produces larger volumes. A virtuous cycle.
There are limits to how much product a single customer can take, but the other benefit of lower pricing is that it draws in new customers from competitors or brings in new customers to the market. Which is the game Amazon has been playing that so offends their enemies; they are looking to expand the pool of ebook buyers beyond the techie/hobbyist niche that existed pre-Kindle. And more ebook buyers will mean more ebook sales now and in the future. The bigger the buyer pool gets--the faster the pool gets big--the better for *everybody*. It's not a zero-sum game; there is room for many winners.
What the traditionalists seem to (conveniently) ignore is that Amazon's game can be played by anybody. Just ask Kobo. Or B&N.
All it takes is the desire to play to win instead of whining and pining for an age long gone.