It may seem like a lifetime ago already, but Americans and all those who “celebrate” Black Friday and Cyber Monday were just chattering about deals, or lack thereof, this year.
Part of the decrease was due to supply chain issues, part to increased demand, and part to spreading out sales and shopping to earlier dates, but nonetheless, “consumers have been surprisingly willing to accept price increases,” Ken Perkins, founder of Retail Metrics, told Bloomberg.
Is this temporary? Most likely, as a result of everything we just noted, but there’s a possibility that the price slashing of the future won’t look the same as Black Fridays of the past. One more factor to consider is that more businesses are using, or want to use, better technology to drive their decisions. In Adobe's Digital Trends 2019 report, 50% of organizations said they planned to increase their CX-related spend, with AI and real-time experiences as key investment areas.
We’ve seen a few new tools recently that leverage AI to offer sellers dynamic pricing. Yesterday, Moonship launched its AI tools for Shopify merchants to offer personalized discounts. Moonship uses machine learning models to predict what visitors will end up purchasing, only giving a nudge in the form of a personalized discount to non-purchasers. Maker George Zeng (ex-Facebook and Groupon) says the tool can increase sales by an average of 20% and as much as 80%, and takes less than a minute to install without technical expertise.
Haglit is another AI-powered software for Shopify, but works as a chatbot that haggles with your customers to decide on a price they’re willing to pay.
On the B2B side, there’s Corilly, an AI-powered price optimization and localization service for SaaS companies. As co-founder Abel Riboulot notes, most companies tackle worldwide pricing by addressing a foreign market or two, but, “for instance, the purchasing power of Norway is 30% higher than the US, and Indian tech salaries are 60% lower than in the US.” Corilly’s API systemizes your pricing page and enables you to run price experiments. Last month, the YC-backed startup launched an update that included improvements to the service and more out-of-the-box integrations with payment processors like Stripe and Paypal.
If you’re a business owner, or know one, what do you think about using AI tools for adaptive pricing? Check out Moonship and leave your questions for Zeng.
- Give Wikipedia a clean, modern interface.
- Fable launched its web-based motion design platform with “a powerful toolkit” and a centralized workspace for easy collaboration.
- Invoice2go is a new all-in-one platform for small businesses to manage finances, from invoices to payments and purchases.
- api.video launched Progressive Upload, which makes content available for playback seconds after end recording.
Pendo just doesn't talk about product-led growth, they live it as well. That’s why they released Pendo Free in November 2020; a free-forever version of Pendo that helps you better understand your users with analytics and engage with them using guides. In October 2021, they took another product-led step, opening Pendo Free to mobile apps. With this new release, you can understand all aspects of your user's cross-device journey as well as how they behave and interact with your mobile apps.
Food delivery is so 2013. Now it’s all about how fast you can get your groceries delivered. DoorDash launched its own on-demand grocery delivery service (10-15 minutes) yesterday service in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC. It’ll be employing workers full-time to fulfill deliveries.
DoorDash will have a leg up to others in the space, but it's getting crowded out there. Getir in Europe is acquiring UK-based Weezy, Instacart is planning to introduce its own on-demand service and IPO next year, and nine-month-old newcomer JOKR just raised a $260M Series B to propel it to unicorn status. 🦄