How do you decide your pricing? *Want to trial new research driven strategies*

I guess it really does depend if you're in a repeat business type of market, which is something I hadn't thought about too much. I still think there's a place for data and experiment driven pricing though - perhaps in terms of pricing for add-ons, or the format of you payments. For example, you could pay for a magazine issue by issue or as a subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could actually increase profit without changing customer experience by experimenting with these. Do you mind if I ask what industry you sell in?

A lot of it depends on the niche. In an ideal one, you are selling name brand products and all of the manufacturers have M.A.P. pricing. In that case, you are just occasionally checking things out to make sure everyone is adhering to the rules.

Even if there is not M.A.P. pricing, when you are dealing with name brand products, there is really only so low people can go before they are no longer profitable. We run the same price checks, described above, every other month unless we see a need to do it more often than that. Again, though, when you are talking about established sites that are near the top of the rankings, they don't tend to budge much on price, if ever. They are going to get the lion's share of the clicks and they have no reason to bend when sites that get very little search traffic lower theirs.

The volatility comes when you are selling generics. The level of quality and prices is all over the board, which is one reason we try to stay away from the China sourced, no-brand products. You often find yourself competing with website companies that are in countries where making a dollar of profit on a sale is a good thing (we don't waste our time on anything where we can't make at least $25 per sale, preferably considerably more). We DO have some sites that have these kind of products but those are all impulse buy products that we know are at a low price point where people do not do much, if any, price comparison and we market to those people exclusively on Facebook and/or Instagram. We don't do any price comparison research on those products.

We hardly ever play with prices, trying to squeeze out an extra dollar of profit and weighing whether that extra dollar works out better with a slightly lower conversions rate. We're not in the same shoes as other companies. We have more than 30 websites and it would be too overwhelming to do that (the cost of added employees to do that sort of thing would rarely justify any additional profits). If we were a manufacturer or if we only had one website, we probably would experiment a little more. Plus, lowering your price always opens the door to price wars, which are not good for anybody.