Comments on: Why is ‘cheap’ a false economy? http://www.barrett.com.au/blogs/SalesBlog/2010/470/sales-attitudes/why-is-cheap-a-false-economy/ everybody lives by selling something. Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:15:30 +0000 hourly 1 By: Mark Parker http://www.barrett.com.au/blogs/SalesBlog/2010/470/sales-attitudes/why-is-cheap-a-false-economy/comment-page-1/#comment-1603 Mark Parker Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:03:24 +0000 http://www.barrett.com.au/blogs/SalesBlog/?p=470#comment-1603 Sue, I had an example of this last week in another business. I had a prospective customer hounding me to ship products for free because he had already spent half a day driving around Sydney looking for two products that none of my major retail outlet competitors carried. The prospective customer wasn’t able to understand that they had already invested far more than the $13 I proposed to charge them by driving around Sydney for half a day. So where is the logic in this type of thinking? Why, after I explained to them that we were basically the only option for these products would they then seek to invest such significant time and expense to what? Prove me wrong? I find it frustrating that consumers have this mindset – but then again, as Jerry Harvey commented recently, businesses must stop discounting the s**t out of their products if they expect to make sustainable profits… So has rampant retail discounting set expectations so low that we must spend years rebuilding the value proposition? As an aside, the prospective customer did end up ordering from us. I ended up giving him a discount on the shipping – charging instead for normal parcel post and sending via express (which is what he paid for). Small things like that make a huge difference to the customer experience. cheers Mark Sue,
I had an example of this last week in another business. I had a prospective customer hounding me to ship products for free because he had already spent half a day driving around Sydney looking for two products that none of my major retail outlet competitors carried. The prospective customer wasn’t able to understand that they had already invested far more than the $13 I proposed to charge them by driving around Sydney for half a day.

So where is the logic in this type of thinking? Why, after I explained to them that we were basically the only option for these products would they then seek to invest such significant time and expense to what? Prove me wrong? I find it frustrating that consumers have this mindset – but then again, as Jerry Harvey commented recently, businesses must stop discounting the s**t out of their products if they expect to make sustainable profits…

So has rampant retail discounting set expectations so low that we must spend years rebuilding the value proposition?

As an aside, the prospective customer did end up ordering from us. I ended up giving him a discount on the shipping – charging instead for normal parcel post and sending via express (which is what he paid for). Small things like that make a huge difference to the customer experience.

cheers Mark

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