I’d heard this years ago and thought that it was just a humorous anecdote but have now experienced it enough to believe it is true. Just yesterday, I raised the price on a slow-moving product that hadn’t had a price change in years and hadn’t had a sale in months. I raised the price 20% due to cumulative raw material increases since the last price change and almost immediately got a sale at the new, higher price. This happened on a fast-moving product a couple of months ago when I raised its price, getting several sales almost immediately.
My theory is that the customers who are tracking price changes on products they want to buy panic when they see the price go up and place their order immediately. This might indicate some benefit to pricing volatility, though you run the risk of people who buy at a high price wanting a refund to match the lower price when it is posted. Certainly warrants a little more experimentation.
I agree with this. I also think that there’s something to the “expected price” of an item. At a given point if it’s perceived as too cheap, it has to be “too good to be true” so it gets ignored. If a buyer sees a product at a price they think “that’s suspicious”, but then they see it spike a bit (or a much needed 20%), they may think “I better buy it before it goes up another 10%”
My theory is that changing the price somehow reminds Amazon’s algorithm that the item is there, thus “unsticking” the item from whatever couch cushions it might have fallen into.
@SellerFeller did the ASIN views go up before that first sale but after the price increase?
This was the case during the great stagflation period. If you needed or really wanted an item, and you had the money, you bought it before it increased in price again.
It was regularly discussed in the press, both general and financial.
I behaved that way, myself. Nothing ever went down in price other than some commodities. It was not a bad strategy for buying.
I’m not sure WHY it works, but it definitely worked for us the last time we increased prices. We got a wave of sales for a while after that. I try to keep my prices on par with similar products, but since we are the manufacturer and our formulas are not disclosed, there are no products exactly like mine, for example our Lavender soap would not be exactly the same as someone else’s.
