Even worse, within six months, a myriad of competitors will have popped up in the marketplace, forcing the ASP to completely rework its pricing model and, once again, go to engineering for an overhaul of their online transaction capabilities. From a marketing and engineering standpoint, pricing determination and development is an ongoing, ad hoc process that is inefficient and inaccurate. Price modeling software would let ASPs map out the impact of price adjustments on the bottom line. Further, it would be especially nice if software could aggregate and then itemize the costs that the ASP will incur from certain pricing methodologies. Requires less engineering.
Pricing is a marketing function that takes engineering to execute.
Complex pricing plans require more complex engineering to implement. If modeling software can move much of the development work to the pricing group, ASPs could focus on product software development instead of pricing. Inevitably, valuable resources are taken off task by infrastructure Web development projects such as transaction and billing. If billing software were better integrated, those engineering resources could be more wisely utilized. Once pricing is determined and ready for online publication, modeling software should be able to customize its content to integrate seamlessly into the existing Web site look and feel.