It can be a great tool for businesses that apply it wisely. It conducted a price test on 68 DVD titles, offering them at different prices to different customers, depending on the Internet browser they used. But the buyers discovered the discrepancies while visiting an online forum and complained about unfair treatment. I learned to wait to get the better price. I'd be foolish not to.
Many online auctions use variable pricing to their advantage and that of their customers.
PC Peripherals , a Broomfield, Colo., buyer and seller of hard drives and peripherals, uses variable pricing to make its online auction more attractive to a variety of customer types. PC Peripherals' CEO Bob Wing, says he recently installed variable pricing software that permits scaling of prices based on quantity, allowing him to offer attractive prices to all his customers, whether they buy in quantities of one, a thousand, or something in between. Other companies use variable pricing to provide their customers with a price structure similar to the supply-demand situation of Wall Street. So we decided to devise dynamic pricing software that allows us to constantly bid against ourselves, which lowers the price a little bit every second. When a buyer comes in and buys a product, that bumps the price up.