Want Shopping Cart for new customers

but dont want prices to offend/put off old customers...

[rogerwhittaker1234]

Company I work for has say 600-800 customers that all pay different prices for the products we sell. Obviously we have different prices because large customers buy 1000 of one product and smaller customers only buy 20 of the same product etc

We are keen to put a shopping cart on our site to attract new customers but if we do this our present customers might get bit annoyed at the bargain prices we put on the website, and we obviously we dont want to lower our prices to the customers we currently make nice profit out of.

any ideas? how have any of you got round this?

me and the salesteam have had many a meeting regading this...

thanks in advance

Rog

[Dogza]

You may want to use a shopping cart that allows pricing-per-customer. Set the website up so that customers can not see pricing until they create an account and log-in. Then you can set the pricing levels different for every customer.

[rogerwhittaker1234]

thanks for your quick reply

just playing devils advocate here...

but couldnt one of our customers just create an account log in and then kick off about the prices being much lower then he is currently paying.

A thought at one of our meetings was if someone does enquiry from the website for a quote we usually get a 50% conversion and a sale. But we were thinking if people came straight on the site saw the product they want saw a nice price next to it they would buy it there and then.

[Corey Bryant]

A lot of companies offer a discount when you buy in bulk. And I have seen a number of carts that even wil say a certain price, i.e 0-50 $24.99, 51-100 $22.99, etc.

There is nothing wrong in offering discounts to people who buy in quantity

-Corey

[rogerwhittaker1234]

thanks for your reply

any more ideas?

customer logins? promo codes?

[RailMan]

why are you going to offer prices on the web that are lower than you normally charge your smaller customers?
why not put the highest price on the web?
after all, if you're getting a 50% conversion rate at the higher price anyway .....
successful selling online isn't just about lowest price ....

[edited by: RailMan at 9:15 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2007]

[rogerwhittaker1234]

we get the 50% conversion at the low price though.

So are you saying put the medium/high price on the web, see what happens, see what response we get? If you get a sale at a high profit margain it's a bonus.

[rocknbil]

You could be treading thin ice. This is especially true if your publicly posted pricing poses a competition to some of your private customers. An example is a wholesaler that also sells retail - is this what you're talking about?

Customers I have worked wih in this situation have opened up a "retail outlet" division to market at publicly posted prices. This division has no indication of being part of the wholesaling company. If your private customers make the connection, your justification is the pricing for retail has overhead that's not involved in the transactions with the private customers.

[rogerwhittaker1234]

rocknbil

not really the situation no - thing is we have distributor customers and end user customers so like you say were on thin ice. we have thought about the retail outlet theory but do you think you lose abit of the brand/trust?

[Abison]

Hi Roger,

So are you looking to sell your products direct to the consumer while still maintaining your whole sale customer base?

Have you thought about setting up a separate site completely? You could run it off the same database but give it an entirely new domain and look/feel?

Just a thought. Many companies do both wholesale as well as direct to consumer and are able to do so without offending their whole sale customers.

Another option would be to implement territory exclusions to protect your wholesale customers or give them credit if orders come direct. As long as your system could handle this.

-Scott