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Thread: Advice needed on change in strategy...

  1. #1
    Email problem RKS Computer Solutions's Avatar
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    Lightbulb Advice needed on change in strategy...

    Hi guys,

    Need some input on a matter...

    You guys must have noticed the World Cup Cost Price Notebook Promotion thread...

    What I've done up until yesterday, was display the change in price on my normal pricing versus what I am selling it for for the duration of the World Cup...

    Many have said that the difference in price is negligible, but what many people don't realise is that my pricing is already at the best levels in SA...


    What I have done, starting today, is to make the normal price that of one of my competitors... Suddenly the difference is huge, R1300 for the next 7 days and then my normal pricing will kick in and show R1000 difference until the end of the month when I get new pricing...

    My questions are this:

    From a marketing viewpoint, will the bigger gap in price bring more visitors and perhaps more sales?

    Should I rather take an average price from all of those of my competitors and show that as a competitive price in order to highlight my pricing?

    Does the general public really investigate when a promotion coupled with a huge event is presented to them, or does the public only see this as normal marketing?

    What in your eyes, and be honest, can be done to make this promotion more presentable and inviting to the general public and corporates country wide?

    Be honest in your answers, be straight forward, and let me have your greatest ideas.

    I thank you in advance!

    Riaan

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    Interesting idea. I got to that thread first and went "Now that's a saving!" In a way, reading this thread ruined the moment, but when you think about it, that is the saving if you buy it now.

    As to the underlying subtleties - I'll have to feel that one over for catches.

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    Platinum Member Chatmaster's Avatar
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    There is two benefits here Riaan.

    1. The prospective buyer sees a great discount!
    2. The prospective client sees a very expensive, quality and valuable product at a great discount price.

    Increasing the price creates the impression of more value!
    Roelof Vermeulen (Entrepreneurship in large organizations)
    Roelof Vermeulen| Rock flaps south africa

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    Email problem RKS Computer Solutions's Avatar
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    Thanks for the comments guys, sorry for ruining the moment Dave... I do agree though that that is the total saving when purchased from my shop and not somewhere else...

    CM, agreed, that's what the small voices in my head tell me, but reason also comes into the argument saying that I cannot just pull a figure out of thin air purely to show my great price off...

    Need a definitive point of measuring my competition and using that if possible in order to show real value...

  5. #5
    just me duncan drennan's Avatar
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    How about inserting a link to the product on Jump in the price?
    [SIGPIC]Engineer Simplicity[/SIGPIC]
    Turn ideas into products | The Art of Engineering blog

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    Independant third party verification is always handy. How reliable is Jump though - anyone know?

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    Email problem RKS Computer Solutions's Avatar
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    The problem with pointing to an offsite link, is that the customer immediately moves away from my site, and if they do follow the link, and do click on my product, I pay jump for that privelage...

    Another thing, is that Jump takes about 48 hours to get my products listed, their system for getting products onto the site is kinda bad, they pull my product feed every 6 hours, but they only seem to import it into their database every 48 hours... Then, to get the comparison done properly, I have to contact my jump sales manager and ask her to manually put the item and other similar items together before a proper comparison shows up...

    Take today's notebook, here, my notebook/price haven't even been uploaded yet, will probably only show on Friday morning and then only can I ask for the comparison to be done...

    That makes a time based promotion like this useless if the main price indicator which you wish to use, is 48 hours behind you...

    --edit--

    Just to give you an idea... The notebook was loaded just before 1 this afternoon, and even though Jump has updated my feed at 16:53.13, I cannot say when exactly it will be on the site... The general time frame however has been 48 hours.

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    Email problem RKS Computer Solutions's Avatar
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    On reliability with Jump...

    *These are my personal opinions and experience with Jump*

    In August they had a screwup with their click counter, they logged 175 clicks to my site (costing me R1 / click) and I could only track about 57 of those clicks... Their explanation: "Yeah, umm, sorry, we screwed up but it has been fixed, shouldn't be a problem for the future." No sorry, let's refund the difference and fix this issue... When I asked "but what about someone like DP, they have 20 thousand products on there and probably my quarterly clicks within a day or even a few hours, the screwup affected everyone so how much were they loosing out on the deal?" silence...

    I've been with Jump now for a while, and them being a comparative site, I've been hammering on them to actually get similar products compared... The answers given was that they don't have a dedicated person in my market with enough savvy to go about getting stuff compared. I've been doing every comparison possible from my side, spending days making sure things I could get done was being done... Problem with that is this, tomorrow Joe Soap signs up and he is in the same market as me... he has similar products, but if he doesn't point this out to them, those products will not be included in the comparison matrix, because there is no automation or a dedicated team in certain markets to do a proper rundown of their database of clients and their products and get them compared as soon as possible.

    Another problem I've had with getting products compared, is that for some reason some of my product codes got screwed up in the importing process and as such my products couldn't be placed in the comparison matrix, even though this was being done by hand. *This is notable on my APC ups range, but a full feed reset has been done since and things are looking up...

    Reporting is not what you'd expect from a company that claims to be the best comparison shopping site in South Africa, and certainly not for the price they charge... In my backoffice I have 3 different reports regarding clicks: 1) Click Report; 2) Most popular products and 3) Todays top 20. According to the powers that be at Jump, these 3 reports all update at different times, within an hour timeframe...
    the first report, Click Report, only shows IP addresses of people who clicked, screen size, OS and browser... This is supposedly the most accurate report on clicks they have...
    the second report, Most Popular Products, doesn't fair much better. While it does give you a good indication of your most viewed products in the last 30 days, with CTR and so forth... However, this according to the powers that be includes clicks from themselves which you are not charged for, but is not pointed in in a separate column so you cannot be sure of how many of those clicks reaching your site is from their testing, or from a customer really looking at your product...
    the third report, Todays Top 20 shows what your most popular products for the day is... This is a temporary report, supposedly updated every hour, and if you don't click at exactly 23:59:45 onto this report, good luck knowing the totals for the day, it's just not available... Also, and I wish I took a screenshot of this yesterday, I had 1 click on the ATi Radeon X1550 graphics cars, but 0 views... umm, ok, how does a customer click on my product without it being viewed? Their whole setup is so that a client clicks on any product, a view is logged, and then if he clicks, it opens up a new page where the clicks are recorded and then forwarded to the relevant product on the site... So, I'm asking you with tears in my baby blue eyes, how exactly did someone click through to my site, without viewing the product?

    All in all their reporting is not accurate in my eyes, the stats I've asked for to be made available on the site, has been put down for meetings and so forth, but none of it has realised in the 3 months now I've been with them... I didn't ask for major things, only things that would point to a more user-friendly report that could actually be used to confirm on my own reports.

    Every request for details regarding my questions has been met with "We are currently working on a complete redesign of the site which should go live early next year and your concerns have been noted." So, in the meantime, for the next 3 and a half months, I should trust a system that has already proven to be buggy and not providing what it claims?

    With all the above being said, Jump has brought me their share of visitors to my site, I can't provide a link between them and any sales, even though my main back office page on Jump states the following: "We have sent you potential sales to the value of R1,591,072.76". I believe in what they are trying to achieve, and even with all the bugs, see it as a valuable source of marketing, building a brand name, and proving to the general public where you stand in relation to your peers... I also believe that a site like Jump can bring better deals to the public, whereby peer pressure can make you rethink your pricing and where you want to go...

    It's rarely a great idea to cut your own throat in order to gain the business of a customer, but absolutely never a good idea to cut the throat of your customers...

    So, all in all I think Jump is doing a stellar job keeping me and my peers on a similar level and providing the public with a great service in general to save them money... Apart form the nags noted above, they are a great team of people, my contact, Liza, is one of my heroes, simply for understanding my comments and trying to rectify things...

    *These are my personal opinions and experience with Jump*

    Anymore info I can provide, just ask....

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