Do not talk about pricing • Hacker News Board

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#171

Post by restalis » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

increment_i wrote: post #35

wildmusings wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point but I don't think this is the main dynamic at play. I'm much more hesitant to buy a $5 app, a one-time purchase, than a $7 beer.

Is it possible that you now (like most consumers) have been conditioned to expect apps to be free? Meanwhile, nobody expects anyone to give them a pizza or a beer for free.

Those two cater needs of different levels on Maslow's hierarchy. People don't have to pay for air and sometimes even for (clean enough) water, but if they'll have to they will pay for that before paying for some $5 digital artifact.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#172

Post by restalis » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

mikeokner wrote: post #114

When I was in college, we bought the absolute cheapest beer per oz we could find as long as it wasn't Red Dog. Not sure where they found college kids fooled by a % discount.

They must have studied a group through hypothetical choices (instead of actual choices that had any weight on their budget), or they did an open study in which the tested subjects could have chosen something based on how they wanted to be seen choosing, or it may be just plain memetics, or any other reason. That is, however, most of the time the close as you can get to the actual human behavior within a reasonable effort (i.e. unless you're willing to go with covert surveillance or something).

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#173

Post by restalis » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #37

How about instead of anchoring or negotiating or special discounts or sales or any of this nonsense, we have a simple agreement: I, a customer, will give you money for a product/service, and you deliver that product/service as described with no conditions, strings, or other such insulting attachments and we call it a freaking day? When did commerce get so bloody hard?

"When did commerce get so bloody hard?"

I guess since the revenue optimization ideas kicked in! How do you think something as enticing as revenue could have eluded the desire of "doing it better"?

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#174

Post by groovy2shoes » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #111

lucaspiller wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do alienate customers, and for a lot of companies this is on purpose. Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's enterprise products on their website - you won't - their products aren't designed for the casual browser, they are designed for directors who have budgets in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars range (where strangely the price ends up pretty similar to the budget). This is the type…

With Oracle and IBM you often can't even figure out what the damn thing does. I have had several occasions where senior management told me to check out that really cool technology they saw. I went to the website and tried to find out what it does and couldn't figure it out.

Not even just Oracle and IBM. When I was considering the offer from my current employer, I was perusing their Web site to try to find out about the product I would be working on. I read a couple of whitepapers and such, and for the life of me couldn't figure it out (though in this case, I suspect someone with more domain knowledge than I had might find the whitepapers sensical).