ljd

16 ms·

121.
by ljd 14y ago
You are absolutely correct. Controlling supply is almost always the reason for raising prices and there are some benefits to it. Imagine a hacker news post that says, "Über isn't picking me up to take me to safety." Neither headlines are
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by ljd 14y ago
This kind of dynamic pricing is precisely what we do via our REST API[0] for ecommerce shops and event providers. I can assure you that there is nothing evil about this kind of activity - it's all mathematics and economics. No one at Über
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by ljd 14y ago
I understand where you are going now. To be fair, your point about certain people selling on low margins comes up with us and we usually start those companies at $1/product/month on our pricing and go down from there depending on how many
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by ljd 14y ago
Customers that do tens of millions of dollars a year tend to call us and get a lower price from us. They don't use the signup box. It's common for enterprise companies to self select by calling for special pricing and in most cases we ob
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by ljd 14y ago
Ha! I loved your technical comment though. It was hard to respond to because I couldn't disagree about how difficult pricing can actually be. We don't have a lot of marketing people on our team, so our whole idea of marketing is: If we h
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by ljd 14y ago
It's not hill climbing. Gradient descent has some severe limitations. Also, I have mentioned it before but if you are charged 1% and someone makes you 2%, I don't understand why you wouldn't buy from them. (On a side note: we earn our se
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by ljd 14y ago
We are making all of our vendors more than 1% and for some we've doubled their revenue using a Limited Supply strategy. They weren't a large store but we did make them several thousand more per month.
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by ljd 14y ago
Hi, I'm one of the cofounders. Your description is a great start to what we are doing. There are more considerations that just that but to be fair we aren't publishing papers on economics. We really do want to combine well understood e
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by ljd 14y ago
While pricing is in fact a very complex topic and we actually incorporate some of the aspects of grouping that you are mentioning, when it comes to communicating what we do to small to medium sized ecommerce shops we found that it was best
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by ljd 14y ago
Hey, I'm Luke. I'm one of the founders of Ventata. This is quite unexpected but I'm trying to bring more people online to help with questions and such. For now, I'll try to answer as many questions as possible.
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by ljd 14y ago
Our entire business is about giving ecommerce stores the ability to price discriminate algorithmically. Our servers aren't being malicious they are only charging you the most you are willing to pay. If you don't like a product then don't
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by ljd 14y ago
We have been seeing this kind of movement in our data. People are switching out from being price takers to price setters by picking their offering more carefully. Of course, it becomes more difficult when you are a monopolistic competitor
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by ljd 14y ago
There is an interesting parallel to the Zynga model and before you think I'm being too extreme, consider my opinion nihilistic in the sense that I don't believe Zynga is or has ever been Evil. Zynga was a casino. The games offered no real
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by ljd 14y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
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by ljd 14y ago
If you want another way to attack the price problem, you can always emulate real markets. In this position you are the market but you are also the IPO underwriter for each stock. You should pick a certain level of stock, it can all be equal
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by ljd 14y ago
I have an iPhone 5 that casually tells me to make a left against traffic to a 25ft drop to the freeway below. I'm not quite sure I'll forget that a product like this shipped out of Apple anytime soon. I don't live in some obscure suburb or
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by ljd 14y ago
In Economics we call creating a unique product and/or brand Monopolistic Competition[1]. Almost all of our dynamic pricing ecommerce clients are monopolistic competitors. It makes sense for them. If they are competing on amazon, they ar
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by ljd 14y ago
I'm not necessarily sure that I follow. How do you create a market for participant selection?
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by ljd 14y ago
I could be wrong, but I believe insurance companies don't charge more than they pay out. That instead, your premium is equal to how much their actuary tables say they'll have to pay for someone with your level of risk. They make all their
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by ljd 14y ago
Adverse Selection[1] is a big problem with insurance in general. Insurance of this nature has adverse selection problems in spades. The people that think their startup is likely to fail will be most likely to contribute to the pool. [1] h
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by ljd 14y ago
I saw a preview of these docs a few weeks ago. They were very helpful.
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by ljd 14y ago
Congrats, it looks great. I'll definitely be recommending this to a few store owners I know. About Shopify, we've been doing integrations for every ecommerce platform for our pricing engine and Shopify's integration was an order of magnitu
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by ljd 14y ago
My above statement is actually aligned with your sentiment. I think people use data analysis to help predict future events like how many customers you'll have or how much an expense will be. I figured, since Keen is in the business of hel
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by ljd 14y ago
Because your customers are going to be more technical I would do the utility pricing. Pay per unit of usage. If you need help with pricing, email me. Our company does algorithmic pricing via a REST API, I'll give Keen access for free. To
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by ljd 14y ago
I've been reading more blogs on how people are upset or confused by Amazon's economics. I'm not necessarily taking an opinion either way but it is important to realize that Amazon is commoditizing every product they can to increase their
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by ljd 14y ago
I agree, it would probably be easier to pay for a service if people really wanted it.
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by ljd 14y ago
Decentralizing would be an easier sell on a mass scale as a hardware solution. I can't imagine asking my parents to implement open source routing software but they bought a wireless router on their own. Maybe Tent should think about a str
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by ljd 14y ago
I think the site is pretty awesome but I had the same exact feeling about the price. If you're interested, I don't mind helping out with that. We have an API that you can use to maximize profit over time. You send us order information, w
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by ljd 14y ago
Yes, I process everything in 10% as well. 15% tip on $34? 10% = $3.4 so half of 3.4 is 1.7, combine them for $5.10.
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by ljd 14y ago
Well there is no magical database solution where you can do that and I have to make decisions on what I can buy today not on what may be magically developed in the future. In this respect, application partitioning with a deployable schema i

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