Raise Price to Improve Revenues and Margins
CHOICE 1 OBJECTIVE: RAISE PRICE, RAISE PERFORMANCE AND COST BY SMALLER AMOUNT
CHOICE 2 ISOLATE SEGMENTS: DUE TO UNIQUE CONVENIENCE
CHOICE 3 COMPONENT: CHANGE THE BASIS OF CHARGE
| No. | SIC | Year | Notes |
| 1 | 3400 | 2002 | Some companies are getting better prices by changing what the customers buy. Wildeck makes metal guard rails and material lifts for factories and warehouses. It has de-emphasized its parts catalog and instead promoted packages in which it also installs its products and improves its margins. |
| 2 | 4813 | 1995 | Now, instead of pitching discounts, carriers want to lure customers by providing one-stop shopping for a range of telecommunications services. |
| 3 | 5600 | 2000 | The entrepreneur of Wear America decided against opening a dot-com storefront because that would have meant spending lots of money. He decided on eBay, where the only customer acquisition costs are listing fees that range from 25 cents to $1 per item. That helps him keep prices low. His other price-saving secret is that he's selling clothes that are typically at least one season behind the designers' newest lines. The advantage of eBay, of course, is that the markets already exist and customers come to you. The entrepreneur of Wear America puts up 700 to 1,000 items up for bid in separate auctions each week' about 75% of the auctions result in a sale. |
| 4 | 6211 | 1989 | Merrill Lynch had an idea for an all-purpose account, one that would include a credit card, a money market fund, a checkbook, a margin account and other frills. The CMA hit a lot of controversy for competition with banks, but it caught on and was a huge success. |
| 5 | 7370 | 1999 | On many sites, users pay about a 2.5% fee to the auctioneer. FairMarket will act as the inermediary between all the net work partners. It will collect the fee which will approximate to 3% of the value of the goods sold. FairMarket gets paid in two ways. It recieves a flat fee each month for auction hosting-the fee starts at about $10,000 per month-and it recieves a 1% cut from every sale on its network. |
| 6 | 7372 | 2005 | The growing popularity of Linux is shaking up the technology industry, challenging Microsoft Corp.'s dominance and offering up a new model for creating software. Companies benefit from free software in several different ways. Distributors, including Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc., package Linux with helpful user manuals, regular updates, and customer service, and then charge customers annual subscription fees for all the extras. Those fees range from $35 a year for a basic desktop version of Linux to $1,500 for a high-end server version. The dollars can add up. Red Hat, which employs 200 programmers, is expected to see profits triple, to $53 million, in its current fiscal year, as revenues surge 56%, to $195 million. |
| 7 | 7372 | 2009 | Microsoft hasn't decided to offer Office 2010 as a monthly subscription service like it does for Exchange and SharePoint, so it will charge its normal up-front price, and companies will maintain the programs on their own servers. But some say the subscription route, which should generate bigger revenues, is coming. Microsoft can charge large corporate customers more to rent software and contract for service than it charges them just to buy the programs. However, Microsoft doesn't know for sure how costly it will be to assume the maintenance load. |
| 8 | 7377 | 1999 | At PeoplePC, consumers don't get the PC until they sign up for Internet access at $24.95 a month for three years, eventually a $900 expenditure. |
<<Return to Choice 3