Revenues of international players will depend on activity in several countries, with different currencies, stages of technological development and cultures and values. International trade and economic trends will affect players in relation to their share in those markets. Distribution may also be important. So producers cannot determine the final price to the consumer as intermediaries apply their own pricing strategies. CD-ROM does, however, offer the database producer more control over the distribution process.
Organisations normally segment a market and design their products for specific segments.
Many information products and services have used segmentation to avoid price based competition, segmenting by user locality, organisation, quality or subject of their products. Discounts are available from some suppliers such as on-line hosts for large volume users, or those who are prepared to predict and commit to high volume use in advance. Language of publication has a significant effect on likely sales, with publications in English finding large markets and giving high and quick return on investment. For non- English speaking publishers, this makes the learning phase longer, more costly and riskier. This situation may be affected by increasing multi-media publishing where language is less significant, but nevertheless, information and language are closely coupled and will remain an issue.