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One reason I'm aware of is for foreign customers who are buying in foreign currencies. As a developer, I don't want to set prices in every currency, so they tra
by barumrho 4y ago
One reason I'm aware of is for foreign customers who are buying in foreign currencies.
As a developer, I don't want to set prices in every currency, so they translate the price grid for me which I found useful.
- black_puppydog 4y agoShouldn't that work for any price you give them? It's literally a multiplication with a number they pull per-day as the conversion rate. That wouldn't change if the price wasn't one of "their" numbers...
- barumrho 4y agoThis means that for foreign customers of yours, your product will have constantly fluctuating price. I personally don't find that desirable. Also, there is some considerations to be made for purchasing power especially for items like apps. $1 might be trivial in the US, but it may not be so in a third world country.
- seydor 4y agothat's quite desireable, i mean it's what everything else in the world does.
- delaaxe 4y agoNo, not every good in the world is priced in US dollars and presented as a random number that changes every day
- seydor 4y agopretty much every good is sold on ebay
- nicoburns 4y agoNot everything sold on ebay is priced in dollars either.
- seydor 4y agothat was my point
- kergonath 4y agoI never buy anything in dollars on eBay. Sterling, sometimes, but it’s euros 99% of the time. Prices on eBay actually look like something a human would choose. On AliExpress on the other hand the prices are all over the place, with really odd numbers of cents, which I assume comes from automatic conversion from whatever currency they initially priced it in (not necessarily dollars at that point).
- xxpor 4y agoThey could offer stickiness settings, like only change the price once the FX rate has moved 10%.
- kergonath 4y agoYes, they can have a set of rules to set the prices. But then it’s not that different from the current system, which really is not problematic in the first place. I know this is the place for pedantic nit picking, but the fact that prices have some granularity is very much a non-issue. In any case, actually probably have such rules, just not public. I am sure they have sales people being paid full time to agonise over such issues.
- dahfizz 4y agoApple obviously uses some conversation rate internally when creating and updating these pre-defined tables. They could use those same numbers, with the same update frequency, with an arbitrary input price.
- kaba0 4y agoHow much do you think about spending 5 dollars? How much do someone who earn 10 times less than you think about that exact 5 dollars? Price categories absolutely make sense.
- PeterisP 4y agoThe whole point is that it is not a multiplication with a conversion rate, it's a mapping that is not purely multiplicative, which has coefficients that in some regions may be significantly different than the exchange rate, that provides round numbers and stickiness to them, and avoids temporal fluctuations - prices in regional markets get adjusted when the ratio gets too far off, not with every change in excahnge rate, in order to reduce the frequency of price change.
- kybernetyk 4y agoBut they don't fairly translate the price. They just make up numbers for different currencies. $49.99 translates by Apple's standards to 59.99 EUR - which is roughly 10 Euros too much.
- Idiot211 4y agoDoes that 59.99 include VAT at 20%?
- oakesm9 4y agoIt does, yes
- miskin 4y agoInteresting thing is that there is no way (that I could find) to buy apps in AppStore for my VAT registered company in a way that I could receive invoice with company details and all necessities to be able to get VAT refund. They seem to pretend they are always selling to private persons and this is not necessary, yet there are many business apps and I am quite sure for business app VAT on 10,000 Eur app would hurt.
- mr_toad 4y agoApparently invoices can be obtained by contacting customer support.