I posted the following in the Kobo Discounts Discussion Forum.
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For those who are interested Mark Lefebvre, Director of Kobo Writing Life, gave a talk at Book Expo America on common digital publishing pitfalls reported on by Chris Meadows at Teleread here:
http://www.teleread.com/kobos-mark-l...hing-pitfalls/
For what it is worth I found the following two quotes interesting:
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Lebebvre demonstrated an interesting feature of Kobo’s retail system, which has to do with a built-in currency converter that optimizes prices in the new currency rather than doing a direct conversion. For example, converting a US $5.99 price to Canadian dollars comes out to $7.70, which doesn’t look like a natural price. However, Kobo’s system will automatically round that up to $7.99 Canadian, which looks more like the sort of price we’ve been trained to expect to see on a web store. (UK pounds and Euros round to the nearest .49 or .99 price, given those currencies tend to have higher conversion values.)
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One interesting point Lefebvre made regarding price is that, since Kobo is global, it sells in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and elsewhere, in addition to the US. And customers in some of those regions—such as Australia and New Zealand—are used to paying more for e-books, so publishers can afford to price their e-books higher there.
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I later elaborated slightly in regard to another post as follows:
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@BearMountainBooks. Maria. Thanks for the information. I'm curious why your boxed sets do so much better on Kobo and by a large margin. I would have thought Amazon should sell more. Do these Box Sets get more prominence on Kobo? It would certainly be nice to know as it may enable you to improve sales on the other sites.
As agency has never been challenged in Australia (and presumably New Zealand also) I took Mark's comments as a simple statement of fact reflecting BPH practices in Australia and New Zealand. I totally agree with Lynx-lynx. I think Australian's are sick to death of this, not only with books but software and all sorts of other items. The attitudes that Lynx-lynx refers to are actually recommenatons to Government by I think the Productivty Commission and a Senate Enquiry notable for grilling Apple and Adobe amongst others on their practices in this regard. One can only hope that Government adopts these recommendations, but based on past experience I am not hopeful.
I found Mark's comments on "optimising" the prices on conversion quite incredible. OPtimising for who? I would rather save the 29 cents in the example given, a price increase of 3.37% for absolutely nothing and likely on top of an exchange rate already incorporating some commissions or other charges. And, believe it or not, I doubt there are any readers who would be dismayed by a price ending in .70 rather than .99. Nonsense of the first order. I wonder what evidence if any is available to support what to me is meaningless drivel. If Kobo recommends the practice, automated or not, presumably it does have something to support its efficacy. To me the practice discriminates against Non-US customers and does not pass the so-called "smell test".
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I don't take Mark as actually going so far as to advocate the practice in relation to Australia and New Zealand, but he does come close.