Rob Craven’s Post

I've gifted this interesting and disturbing article. "One of the more powerful forms of price obfuscation was the fee. Retail platforms often listed products in order of price. “So, of course, certain retailers realized they could charge one cent for a video camcorder, and shipping would be $250,” Sara Fisher Ellison told me. Fees were often obscured until the end of a transaction—a practice dubbed “drip pricing.” ... That doesn’t mean it’s [personalized pricing] not happening. Back in 2015, for example, The Princeton Review was caught charging higher prices to students who lived in zip codes with large Asian populations. Since then, the data that can be used to customize prices have become more fine-grained. Why do you think every brand suddenly has an app? Because if you download the Starbucks app, say, the company can access your address book, financial information, browsing history, purchase history, location—not just where you live, but everywhere you go—and “audio information” (if you use their voice-ordering function). All those data points can be fed into machine-learning algorithms to generate a portrait of you and your willingness to pay. In return, you get occasional discounts and a free drink on your birthday. ... According to Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who helped lead antitrust efforts as a special assistant to President Joe Biden, opacity is the point. The explosion of complex revenue-management schemes allows companies to increase their margins by innovating on pricing, rather than by improving their products or service. The closer we get to personalized pricing, Wu told me, the more we inhabit a world in which “everything in life is like paying for beer at the Super Bowl: Everything’s at your maximum willingness to pay.” There’s a joy—or, in economic terms, a utility—in paying less for something than you might have. “In that model,” Wu said, “you get none of it.”" #technology #business #ai #economy #publicpolicy #regulation https://lnkd.in/e2ng3gUt

Game time! I recently shared a test from Noom where they tested showing prices early in their journey. Butcherbox tested something similar here. Did it have a similar outcome? What do you think won? DoWhatWorks sees tens of thousands of tests. So we can analyze what tends to win across tests. Butcherbox tested how transparent to be with pricing early in the journey. You don't want to hide it, but if you show it too early you may scare people away before they get the value. It lost for Noom. Do you think it won in this context? Guess the winner by leaving a reaction and we will DM you to let you know if you got it right. #cro #conversionrateoptimization #growth #plg #marketing #DTC #pricing #ecommerce

Sanity check on NBO output is often forgotten like that one sock that always goes missing in the laundry! We data people, can ace prediction accuracy, precision, recall, AUC, and even predict what you had for breakfast (just kidding! 🥞), but can we tell if customers actually love our recommendations? 💰 Hold onto your spreadsheets, because without this check, you might find that up to 40% of recommendations are like ordering a pizza with all the wrong toppings! Wrong prices, mismatched resources, or a complete 'we-got-nothing' scenario! Talk about a recipe for a customer facepalm and a sales team in channels sobbing into their keyboards! 😱 Don’t know how to make a sanity check? DM me, and I’ll share some tips and tricks. #NBO #CustomerExperience #Recommendations

Stat Snack: $19.83 💵 
That is the grocery bill (after a $1 coupon) that Kevin had to pay in the movie “Home Alone” in 1990. How much do you think it would cost if you were looking to buy those same items today? 🤔 Make your guess and then see how you did by finding the answer in this week’s newsletter!

🛍️ Struggling to boost sales using returns in e-commerce? We've got the solution! Join us for an exclusive AMA session on customer returns for e-commerce🔄 🌟 Meet our guest, Leroy Kerry, Founder & CEO of Magic, a trailblazer in the world of e-commerce returns. Leroy's achievements speak for themselves: 1️⃣ Achieving an astonishing 90%+ success rate in matching returns to new buyers for our pilot users. 2️⃣ Paving the way for sustainable practices in reverse logistics, making it not only eco-friendly but also cost-effective. Got burning questions about optimizing customer returns to supercharge your e-commerce sales?  🚀Drop your questions here: https://lnkd.in/eVnuv_SW

Good thread on why Stock out is a series issue. Didn't know the value lost is 1Trillion! Here's a simple method to think about addressing Out of Stock issues for every ecommerce business: 1. Identify Days On Hand (DOH) for every SKU 2. Setup automatic Purchase Order creation so your team does not miss out on manually checking it. PO gets automatically sent to suppliers. 3. Setup automated alerts when the inventory does go out of stock or when lead time for purchase > DOH 4. Most common mistake - Not measuring this. What gets measured gets met. Use ZORP tables to manage your inventory - We automatically predict potential stock outs, procurement delays and stock out %. Use ZORP Alerts for alerting on Out of stock, automated PO creation and low inventory levels.

🎁 2023 was a year of surprises and unexpected turns for Amazon and the eCommerce landscape. Even though our crystal balls were foggy, one thing is clear: adaptability is the golden ticket for sellers, brands, and anyone navigating this dynamic ecosystem. Tune in to this episode to hear how Shannon Roddy and Jason Boyce did with their other predictions and the lessons we can take from 2023! 👉 https://lnkd.in/eTu_mPKd #amazon #ecommerce #amazonseller

Danny Sheridan from Fern (YC W23) gave me some tough feedback that led to Common Paper 6X’ing our customer count in 6 months. For most of last year, we had huge usage growth but terrible conversion to paying customers. Our pricing model at that time scaled with the number of “contracted customers” each of our customers had. We figured that this model aligned with the value customers got from our product. Danny was in our YC batch, an active user, and even referred several other customers to us. Basically, the best-case scenario that we could hope for from all of our customers. Then one day he got a bill from us and was (understandably) upset about how much it had grown. We connected live for a direct feedback call. His beef wasn’t just the size the bill, he told me in no uncertain terms that our consumption-based price model was totally disconnected from our value. I usually love conversations with Danny, but this one wasn’t the fun kind. He was brutally honest, and it was the best possible thing for our company. We already had a growing feeling that our pricing model wasn’t working, but it wasn’t until that feedback call that we realized we needed to do something drastic. We rethought our pricing from the ground up and ultimately changed the main dimension, the packaging, feature bundles, and rebuilt the system for managing it all. The impact was instant. We’ve gone from taking months to convert customers with lots of high-touch help to converting at a higher rate within days, often without any interaction. We’ve still got a lot to build, but now we’re doing it with a more grounded sense of how to align our value with our pricing model. Thanks Danny!

#Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to #ecommercelogistics. See how we boosted many important metrics for an #ecommercestartup in our latest case study: https://hubs.la/Q02dSKhy0

Your shopping cart is deceiving you - so is your CDP When you apply a 20% discount to a cart, you don't see a cart in your inventory You see products. And that 20% discount needs to be allocated pro-rata to all products in the cart Your selling price is not always the settlement price. And if you cannot see that organically in your cart, you have to transform it manually through scripting. Your pricing improves when you see the settlement price for products Because in your next round, you're making sure those discounts are baked into the price.