Live data from Hacker News

Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

ninjasandrobots.com

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#11
How does this make sense? It seems to be assuming that the conversion rate is independent of the product's price, the product's quality, and, perhaps even more crazily, what the product is and how it relates to the search term.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#12
post #10

Slick mobile version. I'm reading the article from my iPhone and I'm impressed.

I love it. It's all Dustin Curtis' doing and design. http://dcurt.is/ . He created the SVBTL blog network I'm a part of.

Was just reading your website and saw the Joe Vs. The Volcano clip. That's one of my favorite movies and I've never met anyone else that has even heard of it, much less quotes from it. We might have to be friends.

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it. It's all Dustin Curtis' doing and design. http://dcurt.is/ . He created the SVBTL blog network I'm a part of.

Was just reading your website and saw the Joe Vs. The Volcano clip. That's one of my favorite movies and I've never met anyone else that has even heard of it, much less quotes from it. We might have to be friends.

That's awesome :) Fantastic movie. Are you on twitter or facebook or have a blog?

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#15
post #11

How does this make sense? It seems to be assuming that the conversion rate is independent of the product's price, the product's quality, and, perhaps even more crazily, what the product is and how it relates to the search term. Am I missing something obvious here?

I don't think so. I would think the technique of dividing CPC by the prospective conversion rate might be useful in determining ballpark costs for Adwords as one specific channel of marketing, but it's quite a leap in logic to say "this is what your product's price needs to be".

The idea that a potential market can be understood through such a swift and simplistic means is taking the paradigm of Adwords testing to absurd lengths.

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#16
One of (probably many) caveats to keep in mind is that how ad prices relate to fundamentals can differ a lot across markets. For example, in some markets companies are willing to take a loss on advertising (in the sense that conversions times conversion rate is less than advertising cost), because they value acquiring a customer highly. Sometimes they even are willing to pay more to acquire a customer than the (direct) lifetime value of that customer, if the goal is to build up critical mass to break into a network-effects-heavy market. At the other end, in some markets, prices are based on fairly short-term returns, so people pay $0.50 only if there's a reasonable expectation of > $0.50 in conversions.

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just reading your website and saw the Joe Vs. The Volcano clip. That's one of my favorite movies and I've never met anyone else that has even heard of it, much less quotes from it. We might have to be friends.

That's awesome :) Fantastic movie. Are you on twitter or facebook or have a blog?

@OpenAmazing

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#18
post #11

How does this make sense? It seems to be assuming that the conversion rate is independent of the product's price, the product's quality, and, perhaps even more crazily, what the product is and how it relates to the search term. Am I missing something obvious here?

Agreed. Basic econ theory predicts that if you hold all else equal and increase the price of a product, sales will drop.

If the Google ads list the price of the item clearly, then perhaps the conversion rate won't suffer so much, as those who click through are mostly the subset of people who are willing to pay the higher price.

But, if the ads do not list the price, then we have to assume that some fraction of those who click through will be scared off by the price, and that those same people would have bought had the price been lower.

Furthermore, as has been demonstrated in many A/B testing case studies, a website's conversion rate is heavily dependent on copy, design, product photos, and other such factors. It's not unusual to see sales double after a good round of A/B optimization. And that's just taking into account cosmetic changes. If you consider other market factors as well, you'll see that conversion rates can vary tremendously between different sites.

Therefore, I don't think you can just assume a given conversion rate and then solve for the price.

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#19
The brilliant point in this post is... "I can't just sell an ebook for $102. I'm going to have to create some kind of online video course perhaps. Maybe I could create a software program to help speed readers practice. Etc."

Too many businesses limit their marketing to their existing margins, instead of finding ways to increase their margins and open up more doors for marketing.

The way I see it... Businesses are investment vehicles and marketing is how you turn over your investment. The more times you can turn over your investment, the more money you make.

I am constantly perplexed by people bragging about how little they spend on advertising or marketing. I would be much more impressed if you bragged to me about how much you can spend on profitable marketing.

Re: Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build

#20
post #11

How does this make sense? It seems to be assuming that the conversion rate is independent of the product's price, the product's quality, and, perhaps even more crazily, what the product is and how it relates to the search term. Am I missing something obvious here?

I think his point is more that adwords, as an auction marketplace, represents the higher end of what it costs to buy a customer, so if you underwrite conservative numbers for buying customers with adwords, and used that number as the threshold of the minimum price you have to charge. This number is a great bottom line margin to build your product around.
Post reply on HN