Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Pharmacies and convenience stores/gas station shops seem to do fine despite objectively (but not objectionable) high pricing. I've seen some of the gas stations adding home repair tools in addition to the expected auto tools. A lot of that is maximizing the take from the traffic you get. Covenience and timeliness factor into the buy-no buy, buy here or order online and wait, decisions. It doesn't always favor online.
Likewise, higher pricing per-se isn't offensive as long as it stays within range of the sweet spot. We see a lot of this with Indie books where proper pricing (or price jogging) can be very profitable. The sweet spot globally is known to be around $4 but it varies by genre and by author. Romance typically clusters around $3, SF around $5. Variance of a buck or so from the genre baseline isn't necessarily a dealbreaker if the author has a track record with the buyer.
Which is one reason for the toys and trinkets Indigo/Chapters has done so well with (reportedly) and B&N not quite as well. On the latter end, I recently saw a comment to chew on re: store layouts. I saw a comment by a parent saying she and many she knew now actively avoided B&N while shopping for kids books because of "the toy gauntlet", having to drag the kids past all the pricey, "enticing" toys they aren't going to get, in order to even look at the books. 
Valid point.
Toys and kids books might seem like a good fit...during the xmas season. The rest of the year?
Directing traffic through B&M stores is an art; it can be a plus or a minus.
Online it's "simpler": just minimize the steps needed to find any specific item, either through indexed categories, search, or both. (Not that doing either right is trivial, as Walmart, Rakuten, and B&N.com prove. Haven't heard great things about Kobo's search, either.)
Like so many commercial activities, there are way more ways to get things wrong than there are of getting things right. |
The problem is that what you call the sweet spot price wise is pure SWAG, not based on the data. We don't have the data on ebook sales, we only have Amazon rankings and a few SWAGS put out by a consulting group that's taken as gospel by some, but doesn't have access to the real data and has been called highly inaccurate by some authors based on what was said about their sales.
The idea that the sweet spot is $4 for an ebook is counter to the fact that people are actually paying quite a bit more than that and making quite a bit of money doing so. Looking at some of the name authors backlist, $7 seems to be a real popular price for a backlist book.
Part of point that the authors were making is that for the most part, entertainment such as music, books and movies is not generic and may should have a price model that reflects that. People are simply willing to spend more on the latest Adele music than they are for some midlist artist.