Cost Plus Pricing: Everything You Need to Know
Cost Plus Pricing: Everything You Need to Know Knowing which pricing strategy to employ for your business can be confusing. Cost-plus pricing is considered the simplest of all. But could it bring the same benefits as more sophisticated strategies? Do the drawbacks pertain to your industry? Should you be considering a cost-plus strategy? At Pricefx, we have spent a decade helping customers work out the best pricing strategies for their specific businesses and are in a good position to guide you on the merits, weaknesses and uses of a cost-plus strategy. In this article we’ll explore what cost-plus pricing is,...
The Best Things That B2B Can Learn from B2C: Getting Digital
The Best Things That B2B Can Learn from B2C: Getting Digital It is no secret that the global pandemic expedited the shift from in-store sales to online shopping in the B2C environment. What is less well known is that the shift is becoming increasingly apparent in B2B sales. If you’re still working exclusively with sales reps and not offering your B2B customers an online channel for their purchases, you’re already behind the latest trends. Sales tactics may be slow to adapt, however, preferences, behaviors, preferences and expectations of B2B customers are changing rapidly. McKinsey reports that 65% of B2B companies...
Airline Pricing Strategies Explained: Types, Examples & Tips
Airline Pricing Strategies Explained: Types, Examples & Tips As an airline trying to improve yields in the ultra-competitive Airline Industry, you face unique challenges that other industries don’t need to be concerned about. Your business is currently facing more disruptions than other industries as you continue to be affected by COVID-19, pilot shortages and the rising cost of fuel. In times like these, an airline’s pricing strategy is critical to ongoing success. At Pricefx, we’ve spent the last 10+ years assisting companies across several industries in becoming more pricing agile and more efficient. This resulting pricing dexterity helps businesses to...
Important Pricing KPIs: What Are They & How Are They Measured?
Important Pricing KPIs: What Are They & How Are They Measured? It’s easy enough to describe what a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is, right? Sure, and 99 out of 100 of you would be right in saying that a KPI is a measure that indicates how on course or how well you are tracking towards you are a goal or an objective that you seeking to achieve in either your personal or business lives. But are you as right as you could be with this definition? It might be a shock to learn that definition is just one half of...
The Benefits of Working with a Pricing Software Partner
The Benefits of Working with a Pricing Software Partner Congrats – your research is done, and you’ve completed the cost-benefit analysis math and the numbers that have spat out all agree that pricing software can add profitability, speed, and accuracy to your company’s pricing. However, while doing the math you’ve stumbled across the realization that you may require a little assistance in either implementing the pricing software and/or putting in place the pricing strategy that will help you yield the unique set of business outcomes that you’re seeking. For example, you may have identified that you require assistance in integrating...
AI In Pricing Software: Why They’re Not All The Same
AI In Pricing Software: Why They’re Not All The Same Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become such a buzzword in the price optimization world recently, that’s it hard to differentiate between offerings. Surely if all the pricing solutions do AI, then they’re all delivering the same kind of capabilities, right? Actually, no. If a language app claimed their AI could teach languages, it wouldn’t be untrue, there is some vocabulary-learning going on, but by no means are you enjoying the promised “get a new soul” experience. As providers of AI in our price optimization solutions, we at Pricefx are well...
What Supply Chain Challenges Mean for the Food and Beverage Industry
Supply Chain Challenges and What They Mean for the Food and Beverage Industry Rising food prices and shortages are affecting everyone in the chain, from farmers and ingredient manufacturers to consumers, but who eats the cost? In this article, we analyze the extreme ebb and flow of food price fluctuations of 2022, and provide strategies to brace for many more changes to come for the remainder of the year. “The term we keep coming back to is the ‘ripple effect,’ with changes occurring now having a downstream impact on goods through the supply chain today and later this year,” said John...
Pricing Analytics Software vs Business Intelligence Software
Pricing Analytics Software vs Business Intelligence Software Pricing your products and services effectively can be a challenging undertaking in these uncertain times full of unpredictable market forces, supply chain disruption and a range of uncontrollable events like pandemics and regional conflicts. To be more targeted and reactive in your pricing, your business may be looking to new technology to assist you in implementing a modern pricing strategy and protecting the pathways to profit you’ve worked so hard to establish. Along the way, you’ve no doubt learned that getting pricing analytics tools to provide you with deep insights will be key....
Machine Learning vs AI in Pricing Software – What’s the Difference?
Machine Learning vs AI in Pricing Software – What’s the Difference? Congrats! You have made the big decision to switch over to the automated solution of pricing software from your outed Excel spreadsheet pricing set-up. But now, the choices for which pricing software you want are becoming blurry and confusing. On one hand, from one work colleague you have heard that pricing software powered by Artificial intelligence (AI) is great, but another of your colleagues in the pricing team has read that Machine Learning (ML) powered pricing systems are best. But who is right and what is the difference between...
Pricefx – A Gold Winner in Price Management Software
Pricefx Takes Gold in Four Different Award Categories Demonstrating Outstanding Product Innovation Pricefx, the global leader in cloud-native pricing software, today announced it has won four Gold-level awards for its outstanding product technology and performance. These awards recognize Pricefx’s innovative technology in a variety of sectors and use cases that help customers maximize margins, increase profits, and close deals. Pricefx was honored with the Gold Stevie® Award for Best Financial Management Solution and another Gold Stevie for Best Manufacturing Solution in the 2022 American Business Awards®. This is the first year the company has received a Gold designation for its...
6 Reasons You Don’t Need Pricing Software
6 Reasons You Don’t Need Pricing Software You know that pricing software helps optimize prices. That’s great. Lovely. You’re happy for those who like that sort of thing, but you really don’t need that. You have your own processes in place and they’re working. You have a pricing team you adore and a sales team who’ll do anything to win that deal. Why would you spend a fortune on software when everything is hunky-dory? At Pricefx, we’ve spent the last decade delivering our pricing solution to companies that want to move their pricing up a gear. And in that time,...
Why You Need Pricing Software – Building A Business Case
Why You Need Pricing Software – Building A Business Case The question of whether to purchase a pricing solution is a difficult one. Do you really need pricing software? Can’t you do without it? And if you’ve decided that pricing software is a need and not a nice to have, you’ll have to convince others. You might discover that it’s not just other projects that you might have to go up against but inertia. At Pricefx, we’ve spent many years helping companies satisfy their need for cloud-native pricing software, by providing a robust, cloud-native pricing solution with which they can...
The Impact of the Russian – Ukrainian War on the Chemical Industry Pricing Strategy
The Impact of the Russian War on Items Necessary for Everyday Living War and conflict can have strange and unexpected consequences on the global economy and in your family pocketbook at home. Europe in particular has significant risks from Russia stopping gas suppliers, insisting on payment in Russian Rubles, and otherwise impacting the local and global economy in a number of negative ways. Pricing professionals need to think outside the box to maintain good customer relationships, respond to increasing cost pressures, and maintain margins during this time of extreme volatility. Let’s look at three examples of unexpected disruption as the...
Top 4 Components of a Chemical Industry Strategic Pricing Plan
Top 4 Components of a Chemical Industry Strategic Pricing Plan Over the past few years, the chemical industry has been hit by a seemingly never-ending barrage of challenges and changes that have forced companies to adapt and pivot to survive. No sooner had plants reopened after pandemic-enforced shutdowns and restrictions on movement been lifted, than demand was spiking amidst raw material shortages, supply-chain bottlenecks, and shipping delays. Not to mention the eye-watering cost increases across the board, with raw material prices increasing 44% across commodity classes, mostly in chemicals. As companies in the chemical industry start price planning for the year...
What is a Scoping Workshop? (In a Pricing Software Project)
What is a Scoping Workshop? (In a Pricing Software Project) Whether you’re tuning up for your company’s first-ever pricing software project or you have already launched several of them in staged expansions to your existing pricing functionality, you almost always begin with the same question. What is the best approach to cover all the aspects of the pricing software planning and preparation for the project? To align people with your vision, brainstorm new ideas, make sure you have all your pricing ducks in a row and finalize your methodology with a clear plan to start, go for a scoping workshop...
How Does AI Work in Pricing Software? – Made Simple
How Does AI Work in Pricing Software? – Made Simple It is no secret that these days your data can lead to Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered algorithms helping companies just like yours price items based on price optimization, competitor pricing, inventory levels, and customer response to sales promotions. Using AI-informed pricing software can help grow profit margins, develop loyalty from price-conscious customers, and eliminate the hard manual work and take away mystery of setting prices. But what is more of a mystery is simply explaining exactly how AI works in pricing software – which is what we will do in...
Food & Beverage Pricing Strategy: Tips, Types & Examples
Food & Beverage Pricing Strategy: Tips, Types & Examples Food and beverage manufacturers have watched in horror over the last 2 years while your input prices have skyrocketed and placed pressure on already constrained margins. What’s more, it is not exclusively food and beverage ingredient prices that are swollen to record levels. Record fuel prices and labor shortages are also an enormous part of the margin compression puzzle. Roll in other factors into the pricing equation like meat prices undergoing rapid rises as the cost for grain to feed animals climbs, and beverage makers are facing a jump in packaging...
What is Value-Based Pricing? Benefits, Drawbacks & How to
What is Value-Based Pricing? Benefits, Drawbacks & How to The power of a value-based pricing strategy to boost profit and revenue has caught the attention of pretty much every organization. But actually, adopting it is a different story. For many, the jump from cost-plus to value-based is just too wide. Will it be worth the effort? At Pricefx, we’ve spent the past decade helping companies successfully make the jump and we’ve seen how their value-based strategy has delivered incredible ROI, so we thought we’d share some of our expertise in value-based pricing with you. In this article, we’ll take a...
Distribution Industry Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples
Distribution Industry Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples As a business trying to make it in the ultra-competitive Distribution Industry, you face some unique challenges that other industries don’t need to be concerned about. Your business is currently facing more disruptions than any other industry as you are the critical lynchpin in the heavily disturbed supply chain between manufacturers on the one hand, and retailers on the other. What’s more your transportation overheads are currently priced through the roof, and labor (if you can get it) costs are rising steadily too. No wonder considering or even re-examining your distribution industry...
Penetration Pricing Strategy – Pros, Cons, Examples & Tips
Penetration Pricing Strategy – Pros, Cons, Examples & Tips Even if you have never heard the exact phrase “penetration pricing strategy” before, the chances are you have seen the pricing strategy in action. Unless you have been castaway on a deserted island the last few years, you have probably seen any number of new internet or cable providers come newly into the market either offering low introductory offers, free streaming services, or extra channels to draw in new subscribers. That is penetration pricing strategy in a nutshell. Penetration Pricing Strategy, by definition, is simply a pricing strategy that is used...
Dynamic Pricing Strategy – Tips & Examples + Pros & Cons
Dynamic Pricing Strategy – Tips & Examples + Pros & Cons When your customers visit your bricks-and-mortar or online store to purchase one of your products, most of the time they will want to know the exact prices of your products beforehand. However, if you are providing services like that of doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, or electricians, setting an exact price is not a simple task. Prices vary because of multiple factors, like time, length and complexity of the service provided. That is a form of dynamic pricing and it certain cases it can be used for pricing your products...
Retail Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples
Retail Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples Over the last few years, a myriad of reasons have popped up increasing the rate of change of what we used to call ‘normal’ in the retail industry. Whether it is due to CoVID-19, rampant inflation, increasing fuel and distribution costs or an increasing drift to online shopping, shifting consumer buying patterns means it is now more important than ever to consider your retail industry pricing strategies. At Pricefx, we have been analyzing retail sales data and setting automated pricing processes for our retail clients for more than 10 years now and assisting...
Economy Pricing Strategy: What Is It & When to Use It?
Economy Pricing Strategy: What Is It & When to Use It? You have low production costs for your company’s products, but you are still struggling to meet your organization’s sales targets? It could be that that you need to consider an Economy Pricing Strategy. Also widely known as ‘Economic’ Pricing Strategy, this concept of pricing is extremely useful for companies that are keeping their overheads low. It enables businesses to price goods low and gain revenue based on many customers purchasing those low-priced goods. But if your business does not enjoy a lion’s market share or strong enough brand awareness,...
Explaining Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning in Price Optimization Software
Explaining Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning in Price Optimization Software Setting the right price for your company’s goods or services is always a tricky question to solve. What pricing strategy your business adopts will depend on your business objectives. One part of your business may seek to maximize profitability on each unit sold or on protecting your overall market share, while another sector of your company needs to access a new market or to grow an existing one. Moreover, different scenarios might coexist in your company for different products or customer segments. If that’s the case, the time might have...
Manufacturing Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples
Manufacturing Pricing Strategies: Tips, Types & Examples Global manufacturing companies are arguably facing a more challenging set of conditions than in other era in their collective histories. The prices of raw materials—including zinc, lithium, iron, copper, steel, lumber, and plastics—are on unprecedented rises, while investment in plant capacity is struggling to keep pace with the demand of growing global markets. Simultaneously, distribution and shipping costs have accelerated in recent times, meaning that manufacturers cannot simply shift production abroad where labor costs are less as a money-saving method. In that light, we are going to examine manufacturing pricing strategies in-depth in...
Everyday Low Pricing Strategy Explained + The Pros & Cons
Everyday Low Pricing Strategy Explained + The Pros & Cons You’ve probably heard the phrase “everyday low pricing” (EDLP) before and it’s possibly lodged its way into your subconscious, particularly if you live in North America. Why does it ring a bell? Because EDLP this is the pricing strategy that Walmart has used to become retail powerhouse. Amazon has followed in Walmart’s EDLP footsteps in the E-commerce sector. But is it for your business too? While it may be tempting to simply carve your prices back to rock bottom levels, it is not as simple as that. There are several...
What Happens To The Pricing Team When You Get Price Management Software?
What Happens To The Pricing Team When You Get Price Management Software? Buying pricing software can be a scary prospect. It’s a big investment and requires a comprehensive change management plan to drive adoption. Once you mention that you might be getting pricing software, no doubt you’ll have questions from members of your team wanting to know what will happen to their roles in the company. And if you lead the team you’ll probably want answers to those same questions At Pricefx, we’ve spent the last decade helping companies of all sizes across all industries to elevate their pricing strategies, fine...
Pricefx – A Stevie® Gold Winner for Manufacturing and Financial Management Solutions (2022)
Pricefx – A Stevie® Gold Winner for Manufacturing and Financial Management Solutions (2022) Pricefx has just been awarded two Gold Stevie® Awards for Manufacturing and Financial Management Solutions. The award was determined by the average scores of judges comprising executives from around the world. Out of the 3700 submissions, we’re proud of the fact that experienced leaders view Pricefx’s solutions as drivers to help organizations meet their strategic goals. This will be the second award from the Stevies acknowledging our contributions to manufacturing, our 3 gold win, and the 6th award for the 3rd year in a row! How Does Pricing Software Help Organizations Like Yours? One of the major challenges that companies...
Why Am I Paying for A SaaS Subscription I Haven’t Started to Use Yet?
Why Am I Paying for A SaaS Subscription I Haven’t Started to Use Yet? There’s nothing worse than having finally convinced the executives that the company needs new software than being called in a couple of months later to explain why they’re paying for a tool but haven’t had a chance to use all the features. Having spent the last decade sharing our cloud-based offering with companies looking to optimize their pricing strategies and processes, we’ve had to answer this question often. And we get it. Buying software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution takes a definite mindset shift. But once you get it,...
Do I Need A Pricing Team To Use Price Management Software?
Do I Need A Pricing Team To Use Price Management Software? Pricing software is not cheap, and investing in a pricing solution is a big decision. Congratulations, you’ve made the decision to use price management software to alleviate pressing business pains. If you’ve made the right choice, the software you want will save you time and spark a not minimal ROI. So, if price management software does all that, do you even need a pricing team to use the software? The short answer is “yes”. Over the past decade, we at Pricefx have learned that pricing software is not for...