Patent ID: 7379922

Claim:
A method for determining a price for a plurality of different types of items to be presented to a specific customer, the method comprising the steps of: providing a sales information database comprising a) the sales history of items sold to a plurality of customers, and b) the gross profit of the sale of each item to each customer; for each customer, calculating the sales volume, purchase frequency and gross profit percent for each item sold to that customer, each of sales volume, purchase frequency, and the gross profit percent being a category of information; for the specific customer for whom the prices are being determined, comparing the foregoing calculation of the categories of sales volume, purchase frequency and gross profit percent with corresponding sales to the other customers; calculating, for each item sold, a relative percentile rank of each category as compared to the sales to the plurality of customers; receiving, from a user, a benchmark percentile for at least one category; receiving, from the user, a desired item gross profit; calculating a market variance delta, which is the difference between the actual gross profit of each item and the desired item gross profit; generating a proposed list of items for which the price to the specific customer is recommended to be increased, based on the market variance delta and based on a difference between the relative percentile rank and the benchmark percentile for at least one category; and displaying the proposed list of items to the user in a tangible form perceivable to the user.