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How Does Pricefx Help to Manage Omnichannel Pricing?

January 10th, 2023 (Updated 03/09/2023) | 12 min. read

By Jochen Schmidt

Today’s technology has drastically impacted how buyers — B2B and B2C alike — interact with brands and organizations. Most generational buying shifts (younger generations growing up with price comparison websites, Amazon and other online shops) etc., but also labor shortages combined with remote and hybrid work have changed purchasing behavior, leading people to buy through online channels with reduced human touch. But in many cases, pricing is not keeping up with the drastic rate of change underway. In a world where now the prices you advertise on your B2C website can be crawled by your competitors and become out of date within an hour, you require automated solutions that do not require manual input. Alternatively, in the B2B environment the net prices can be hidden behind a login wall that is hard to breach. More than ever, the sheer amount of price points and pricing decisions your business is confronted with are simply not manageable with a combination of human labor and Excel spreadsheet technology. Today’s B2B and B2C customers are very clear about what they want from suppliers: more channels, more convenience, more automation, and self-service plus a more personalized experience. In that light, join us in this article where we explain how Pricefx can help you manage your omnichannel pricing. 

At Pricefx, we have spent the last decade assisting customers to track price moves and trends in real time. Through those broad experiences, we have developed technological solutions that can assist in giving all today’s modern business organizations the kind of innovative tools they require to interact in these new transaction types.  

In this article, we will examine what omnichannel pricing is, the benefits and drawbacks of omnichannel pricing, if you can perform omnichannel pricing without the assistance of pricing technology, and finally, how Pricefx can specifically assist your business in your omnichannel pricing regime.  

What is Omnichannel Pricing? 

Broadly speaking, Omnichannel Sales (regardless if it is taking place in a B2B or B2C sales environment) is a multichannel approach to sales that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they are shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar store. 

 

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If your business is offering sales at that omnichannel level, naturally you will want to also have the pricing of your products organized at that same omnichannel level. 

In other words, quality omnichannel pricing will allow your business to manage all the specific price points you are putting out into the marketplace (by whatever method) and pull them all together in a strategic fashion that will work towards achieving your organization’s unique set of desired business outcomes.

Of course, you may not want to sell all your products online or conversely, sell all of them in a bricks-and-mortar store.  

If you sell products that require personalized configuration (say aircraft seats for example), each airline will have their own specification of what they require. For that specialized type of product, it may be best suited for the airline to deal with one of your account executives rather than in your online shop. 

On the other hand, you may have a range of other products that are all identical every time they are sold, and all your customers can purchase them directly from your website if they so desire. 

Long story short, omnichannel pricing is using pricing as a steering wheel to make sure that all the different sales channels you have in your organization are aligned with each other according to the strategies you want to use them for. 

The Benefits of Omnichannel Pricing 

Done right, omnichannel pricing can rationalize your pricing strategies across all your company’s sales channels. 

By centralizing your pricing strategies, you can easily manage and execute effective omnichannel pricing with precision, allowing for harmonized, competitive prices that are delivered across your entire range of agreements, regions, customers, and channels, while maximizing profitability and your customer’s willingness to pay for value, not to mention your company’s other unique set of business objectives (such as increasing revenue etc.). 

You can empower your customers to be as self-maintaining as possible if you want and incentivize them to buy online only (if applicable), thereby decreasing your cost of sales and increasing how autonomous your customers are with your organization. 

Once your customers are used to choosing which method suits them best in their interaction with your business, the huge pay-off is the reach increase that becomes possible with the use of omnichannel pricing technology. 

For example, huge U.S. retailer, Target discovered in 2020 that the use of omnichannel strategies led to increased sales, with omnichannel shoppers spending up to 10 times more than those who only bought in-store or online. 

Similarly, a 2019 report from Omnisend found that brands using three or more sales channels (compared to those with two or fewer) see a 90% higher customer retention rate and 250% higher engagement and purchase rates. 

And omnichannel pricing is no longer B2C only. McKinsey reports that 65% of B2B companies will have transacted online in 2022, a 12% increase on 2021 numbers, and in 2022, Gartner predicts by year’s end that 85% of all business conduct will take place without any form of human interaction.  

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Overall, it is not merely about reaching more sales opportunities with omnichannel pricing. Omnichannel pricing will enable your organization to leverage profit optimization because different sales channels will have a different ‘willingness to pay’ and different strategies like sales targets where you are trying to make the most of like market penetration versus margin optimization in addition to decreasing the cost of sales.  

However, regardless of whether you are in B2C or B2B, the most important benefit is making your customers as self-sufficient and independent as possible. What’s more, if customer retention is one of your primary goals, omnichannel pricing can help give you an edge on pricing without ticking off customers who spend a lot of time comparing prices and products across a variety of channels.  

The Drawbacks of Omnichannel Pricing 

The primary disadvantage of omnichannel pricing is the change management that will be involved for your organization. Many companies have been so entrenched with their sales departments driving their pricing for at least a couple of generations at least, the switch to technology-driven omnichannel pricing can be a shock.  

With omnichannel pricing (and digitalization of the workplace in general), the transparency of customer facing tools like the internet, and everything involved with placing an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) can be a culture shift that many companies struggle to deal with.  

The change management culture-shift can take many forms but leaving behind legacy systems like Excel or other in-house developed pricing system cannot be underestimated either.  

Omnichannel pricing will change the way that your people, (especially salespeople) think within organization, however, it will also require taking an honest examination of your company’s entire system, its systems architecture and the headaches that can go along with the change management that your business will need to undergo to transform to omnichannel pricing. 

Omnichannel pricing is a whole new ball game. Switching to a system whereby quotes and prices are aligned across your CRM system, web shops, EDI orders, marketplaces, direct customer interaction, catalogue business etc. all with different price points managed centrally in real time is a huge transformation.  

Can You Do Omnichannel Pricing Without Pricing Software? 

The short answer to that question is ‘Yes.’   

The long answer to that question is ‘Would you want to?’ 

Of course, to do omnichannel pricing manually without pricing software in a global organization with hundreds of thousands of SKUs and doing business across multiple countries in different time zones, you would require a standing army of thousands of Excel spreadsheet data operators working around the clock 24/7/365. That is not a feasible nor scalable solution. 

Regardless of the physical impossibilities to manage omnichannel pricing manually, the advantage of independent price management would be lost. It’s not manageable in Excel as you cannot keep track of the vast reams of data involved. 

Manual price management means more chances for your company’s pricing to become siloed and isolated rather than centrally managed.  

The result would be disconnected and cumbersome B2B and B2C pricing which is against the highly organized nature of omnichannel pricing. 

4 Ways How Pricefx Specifically Helps with Omnichannel Pricing 

As Pricefx is a pricing software company that supports both B2B and B2C, we are purpose-built to deal with your B2C web shop/bricks-and-mortar pricing to calculate dynamic prices for an ecommerce channel. On the other hand, Pricefx is also natively built to accommodate the more advanced requirements of B2B pricing, including rebate management, quoting, static list price management and customer specific price point generation.  

There are 4 major ways that Pricefx can assist your B2B or B2C business to getting your omnichannel pricing ducks in a row:

  1. Personalization for Price Optimization 
  2. Market Education on Alternative or Similar Products 
  3. Prove Additional Information on Product, Availability & Price to Win Traffic 
  4. Concentrate Your Efforts on Areas that Make the Most Difference 

 1. Personalization for Price Optimization 

Pricefx offers the capability to deal with channel specific variation and personalize prices regardless of channel type.  

Using the Pricefx Price Setting Accelerator, we can build up certain price points and then derive optimized channel specific prices according to your channel specific pricing strategies. With Pricefx software, we offer the perfect possibility to calculate prices independently of each other and ensure the right prices are calculated for the right channel based on the right strategy. 

This innate flexibility opens opportunities for our clients to pivot their channel strategies in swift reactions to market moves. For example, one of our large electronics store clients recently moved away from a mix of bricks-and-mortar stores and online shops, to become an entirely a web shop service and maintain a sole flagship store. 

You may think that personalizing your digital channels, either to segments or to each individual channel sounds too difficult. 

 

But……here are some numbers to bear in mind that may change your mind – when an email is not personalized, 52% of customers say they will find somewhere else to go and 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalization.

Using a web shop gives the client a unique possibility to gather additional data about customer behavior and using this to tailor specific pricing from customer to customer, building them a ‘personalized pricing profile’ and examining how distinct types of your customers react differently to price changes. 

Check out the case study below from giant European electronics retailer MediaMarktSaturn on implementing Pricefx pricing software technology customized their unique omnichannel business environment:

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2. Market Education on Alternative or Similar Products 

Taking the better insights into transactional data one step further, Pricefx can utilize those insights in your company’s pricing and guide your customers towards similar or alternative products to those that they have purchased from you in the past. 

Looking at the image below, we can understand that customers who are purchasing the French flag pillow might also be offered to buy the Dutch flag pillow also, as it is precisely the same. 

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Using the transactional and product record data, you can use this product similarity to your pricing advantage in your business and price both pillows similar at €15.99 for those customers that are interested.  

Empowered by technology, educating your customers about more of your products to increase the size of shopping baskets has become possible.  

3. Provide Additional Information on Product, Availability & Price to Win Traffic 

It feels counter intuitive, however, your customers usually find you, not the other way around.  

Use the pricing and product technology on hand to provide product information for your potential customers to guide them through their online buying journeys.  

On average, your B2B customers will view 10 pieces of content before making an online purchase. 

 As a result, high quality content about your products, prices and points of potential negotiation becomes increasingly relevant to your profitability. 

4. Pricefx Allows You To Spend Your Pricing Efforts Where They Make the Most Difference  

Hybrid sales models using pricing software automation in combination with your experienced salespeople are becoming commonplace and lead to more intuitive and customer-appropriate responses.  

Your smaller, everyday quotes could be managed by an automated algorithm. 

This level of automation in sales guidance can lead to an increase in conversion and sales numbers and ensure the sales are made at the optimal price points, not to mention bringing down the overall cost of sales.

Larger, more complex quotes may be more suitable for your experienced salespeople.  

But Which Pricefx Package Do I Need? 

We trust you have enjoyed learning some of the top ways that Pricefx can assist in managing your omnichannel pricing needs. However, every business is different and unique in what it may require. 

If you are interested in exploring the different integrated packages Pricefx offers and to learn more about which might be the best for your business to start with, head over to this article linked directly below: 

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Or if you already know which pricing solution your business requires, talk to one of Pricefx pricing software experts now:

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Jochen Schmidt

Freelance Pricing Professional

Jochen Schmidt has over a decade of experience in strategy consultancy and advisory in addition to pricing and software. Over 7 years with Pricefx, he held several positions including Solution Strategist Manager for the EMEA region and spearheading the global retail industry team as a subject matter expert. Throughout his career he has held various positions at specialized consulting companies, providing value to clients by advising on pricing strategies and implementing pricing software. In his free time, he is a passionate cook, beach volleyball and volleyball player, spending most of his vacations travelling and hiking.