When the first shops appeared on the Internet, the price charged for products was not affected in principle. It was the same thing as before: a number, based on some calculus, and set to be more or less permanent. A price was still supposed to generate revenues to cover expenses for advertising and public relations. Later on, shops appeared where the price was connected to user action, for example in the form of votes, or visits to the site. An example would be good here. I searched for one in my bookmarks, but couldn't find an example I was thinking of. Anyways, these cases of flexible, interactive pricing are still rare and often framed as an event, and not as a permanent pricing strategy.
What if flexible pricing had been there on day one, when the first shops appeared on the Internet? Look at my flexible pricing scheme. It was not hard to implement and is easy to administer. I believe this should be the norm for shops on the Internet, rather than the exception.
For the sake of my argument, think about it - what would happen if people by and large knew that prices depend on the waves of attention flowing through the Net? They know that already? Oh, good. Why do producers still charge static prices then? If they would not, if they would let prices swing in response to visits, it would follow that prices are based more on real attention, and less on artificial attention. It would follow that people know full well that there will be more of the things they love in the world, just because of the attention they give to them.
I call artificial attention all those visits to a site that can be traced to a company's spending for advertising and PR. I am not saying that artificial attention is bad, only that it is induced, and therefore not naturally flowing from word of mouth. In fact, ad spending is often necessary to change people's behaviour for the better.
So, why would there be more real attention? Quiet simply because companies could spend less money on advertising, which only inflates prices. The money they would usually use to buy ads could now be used to let prices drop in response to real attention. The chain of action I see is this: Prices go down, when lots of people visit a site. Prices go up, when few people visit the site. Read on here and here for background. This rhythm is not likely to be corrupted, because neither the company using flexible pricing nor anybody else benefits from trying to push or withhold traffic to a site.
We live in a strange world where an ad makes you think: “look, here is a company that can afford an ad. Therefore the company must be making sales. It must be making sales because their products are good. Otherwise people wouldn't buy them. So, I will take a look at their website.”
This logic implies that ads are a manifestation of success. This logic is flawed, because the respect you give a company shouldn't be based on its financial power to afford ads, but on the value it creates for you. It's financial power is not necessarily the result of sales. Many companies are being pushed by external funding for years without breaking even.
On a day, not so far a ago, producers arrived on the Internet. They decided to keep employing shallow journalists and indifferent ad agencies, instead of syncing their prices with the real interest given to them by people looking for value.
I believe this will change. I hope there will be more and more programmers who start building flexible pricing schemes right into the shop systems. I hope there will be more people who look at how a business is run, and not just at the things on offer. I hope people see that what they do individually can compound to immense action together with others.
In this shop, the Shufflesome shop, prices do no react in real-time, but on a day-by-day basis. That's fair enough I guess, and even though it is nearly impossible for me to track, I hope that some of your visits are timed to take advantage of price switches. At the very least, this system will make it more likely that people are double conscious of whether a price is "high" or "low".
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