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Complexity will invite arbitrage. What happens when someone enterprising enters all countries and surfaces the lowest price codes on a web site for everyone to
by dzink 4y ago
Complexity will invite arbitrage. What happens when someone enterprising enters all countries and surfaces the lowest price codes on a web site for everyone to find? Or when someone buys via VPN and consumes without.
To ensure this system is not abused, you need to match consumption IP location and purchase IP location. If you have consumption via wildly varied IPs that would be a red flag as well. By letting the price difference be known, you encourage a normally willing and able customer to use you via VPN instead.
- pc86 4y agoThis is all true but the question is at what point of scale does the cost outweigh the benefits? At small scale, you get more money (in absolute terms) using price discrimination with no validation on the back end. As your scale grows, you reach a point where it's worth the monetary and time investment to add validation and things on top. At the end of the day someone using a VPN to get your product for $5 instead of $20 doesn't matter that much unless you're so wildly popular that people are clamoring for it, at which point you theoretically have the staff to start adding in some protections.
- ghaff 4y agoAnother factor is considering how difficult you're making things for your legit paying customers just to may sure you keep someone somewhere from ripping you off. A lot of companies strike the wrong balance.