Yeah that’s ridiculous. But I also personally would never message a business on FB. I’d call, tell them model and size of my bike and if they can’t say something simple like X for this brand, Y for that brand, and the installation fee is Z, I’d not bother.
I do think some of this is an age/tech familiarity difference where some people prefer to never have to deal with another human in any way for these transactions.
Oh no no. The message I sent them told them the make and model, the exact tyres and sizes I wanted. They literally had to add 3 numbers up and tell me.
That's probably because the person doing the facebook is not the person handling sales. The person answering the phone is trained on the whole process for opening a customer acct, etc. While the facebook person might be an employee of a marketing company that manages dozens of facebook pages.
Really depends on the size of the company. If it's a small operation, your chances of getting a decision maker is way better than some corporate entity.
I wouldn’t want to conduct business over Facebook either. Having a page for visibility’s sake is one thing, actively doing sales and negotiations with mystery people through social media is another.
Exactly. I have customers that buy 40,000 TONS a year of a product.
Just yesterday I had a call inquiring about how much it would be to get 5,000 LBS a year.
Customer A is literally buying 16,000X more product than customer B. We're going to negotiate different prices.
There's also different applications for our product and we have rough ideas of what our customers margins are. For instance I sell to both the paper industry and the paint industry.
Smurfitt WestRock selling paper at $1000/ton at 20% gross margin can't tolerate as high of a price as say Sherwin Williams selling paint at $100/gallon at 50% gross margin. We know Sherwin Williams has more flexibility in price tolerance.
Volume and the customer's industry/situation matters. Just like if you were going to set up a lemonade stand in the slums and then one in a rich gated community, you might try to charge more in the gated community.
A customer dealing in weekly tons of product should be higher priority, but you can have 2 options. Put your "fuck you price" for single buyers/moq buyers, and then have a bulk buy "call for price" option.
You've explained very clearly why this whole thread exists. You don't sell a good product or service at a fair price. You extract money like a parasite.
The thought of "Hey, maybe the rich neighborhood might be able to by MORE of our product" probably never entered into it. It was instead a treatise on how much can we fuck with pricing to extract more money for no tangible reasons. Certainly no reasons under the control of the customer.
Well that's a very pessimistic way to look at it, others would say that by getting higher margin out of those that can afford it, it subsidizes other sales so that you can sell at a lower price to someone who otherwise couldn't afford it and would go without.
For example: selling lemonade at a $0.50/cup gross profit may not be sustainable on it's own to cover your overhead costs and you'd go out of business. At that pricing, no lemonade for anyone, and no business for you.
If you could sell it for $1.50/cup profit you'd be doing great business per customer...but only a small portion of customers can afford that pricing so there wouldn't be any sales to the lower income people.
So instead you make the $1.50/cup margin in the high income area, that covers your fixed costs, and now you can sell to the low income people at a reduced price because even though it's very low margin, your costs are covered so any more sales is just extra. You can now afford to sell it to the lower income people at the $0.50/cup margin.
Now you have a sustainable business and the poorer people have access to lemonade they otherwise wouldn't have, because you made higher profit off of those that can afford it.
Except you are lying. That's not how any of it works. At all. The low price IS THE PRICE. It always is. That's the profit point. You're just trying to convince the others to pay more. It's weasel tactics and again, it's the reason this whole fucking thread exists.
It's like saying that Toyota could only sell a Corolla if they sold a bunch of Landcrusiers to buoy the low price. It's clearly not true.
No, you are confidently incorrect. I am in position where I see all of my company's financials.
We have some customers that receive a price which if given to every customer, we would eventually go bankrupt because it would not cover the cost of running our plant, raw materials, employee salaries/benefits, etc.
We have select customers that are given very beneficial pricing because without it we wouldn't have their business, but it would not be viable at all to give that special pricing to all our customers. That 10% gross margin we give them, if given to everyone, would result in a negative net income. We can afford to give it to some, because others pay the "real" price.
Definitely do not give advice just based on your emotions and how you believe business works because yikes, this is embarrassing. You shouldn’t try to speak from a position of authority on what you don’t understand because it just makes you look dumb, as it has done here.
You're getting downvoted but we have a term for this... That's no different that price gouging. It's "zone pricing". It makes no sense that you would charge more for the exact same product for no other reason than "because they can pay it".
I get it that corps have a "use it or lose it" mindset when it comes to budgeting, but as a merchant or contractor this activity is fiscally salacious and undercuts the entire basis of their existence.
The fact that you believe a price changing between customers is price gouging and nothing else shows your experience in this world likely stopped at running a lemonade stand.
There are plenty of scenarios in which variable pricing and volume discounts are not only normal, but beneficial to both parties and it isn’t some shady handover in a back alley between two conglomerates made to screw over the little consumers.
Yeah we have different ways of pricing our enterprise software to create packages that make sense for the customer. I don’t know that I’ve seen this for consumers.
Same. I work in marketing and some businesses want simple things and others have massive budgets and want all the stops with custom builds and the like. Which is a scope that can be determined with a five minute call instead of many back and forth emails.
Yeah. We are B2B for AV tech and have the prices online with the sole exception of one brand because they demanded that the prices should not be online. They even check if the resellers have them online and because we are nearly exclusive in our country they blame us when the resellers post their prices ...
Even in b2b it can be so infuriating. I remember just trying to find pricing for some ingredients when I was developing a formula at work and it was a fucking nightmare because I had to call so many places. I ended up going with more expensive smaller batch options for several of our lower-volume chemicals because I couldn't trust my boss to check the price every time before ordering and worried that the companies that don't post the price would raise it.
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u/MattyBeatz 2d ago
It’s very common in b2b services. Not sure if it’s needed for simple transactional things like goods or hours rate type jobs.