Market Women and Dynamic Pricing
It is a regular practice in our African markets, to negotiate prices with merchants in order to get a favourable one that goes in line with your budget. Sometimes, these merchants refuse to budge, more often than not however, they concede and reduce prices or change the quantity of the product to suit the buyer and this leads to client satisfaction, customer trust and ultimately customer loyalty.
We see this a lot in our local markets where market women (merchants) happily engage in back and forth to adjust prices of their items.. In Ghana, it is considered a pretty awesome streetwise skill to know exactly how to haggle the price of items in our local markets. Due to years employing this method of selling, these market women (merchants) are well versed in the art and are frankly flawless in how they are able to negotiate with customers on a daily basis.
The tricky part of this whole practice in the retail industry is how difficult it is to track, measure and manage in light of various factors such as digitization, multiple business branches and business owners not being on site during sales transactions.
For a business with multiple branches, it can be quite difficult to oversee and control exactly the price at which items are sold. This often pushes business owners to set rigid standard pricing for everything so that their sales agents can maintain productive operationality. This situation however does not help to foster client loyalty since sales agents are unable to tweak the pricing or quantities to suit the customers’ needs at the time. As you can guess, it can leave the buyer quite disgruntled with how that business operates.
This factor is very similar to the business owners not being present during sales transactions. Due to a number of reasons, not limited to travel, multiple locations and other priorities, business owners may not always be on hand to make well-thought offers to customers to suit their immediate needs. Sometimes, business owners try to mitigate this by giving express instructions about particular clients. But that whole has a lot of loose ends that may result in deception by the parties involved and unclear limits or offers to be relayed to the client. This may even result profit loss and gross mismanagement of sales activities.
The factor of digitization can be particularly intimidating when these African businesses want to incorporate softwares and technology into their business process. More often than not, they find that the retail solutions available do not cater to the very African way that they may run their business. So they are often left with making a decision to stick with their particular brand of business operation or to make the change to a totally new process just to ensure that they can completely and effectively digitize.
StoreFront is a retail solution that has been carefully made to cater to these very “African” intricacies that colour our retail industry. In this particular instance, the constant re-pricing of items without changing its default price is captured as “Dynamic Pricing” on the StoreFront software. A user can be able to adjust the price of an item during a sales order without the change affecting the default price of the item in the system. So the price change will only be reflected in particular with its accompanying receipts and profit margins. This feature allows businesses to use StoreFront to improve selling methods that are already in use in the business.
This issue of Business owners not being able to manage dynamic pricing while not on site is solved on StoreFront with our Discounts feature. With this feature, automatic discounts (in percentage or amount) can be assigned to certain customers (customer groups or individuals) so that when their info is added to a Sales Order, the discount immediately applies itself. This solves so many issues on the business front as it allows for the Business Owner to be super specific about how prices can be adjusted and for which particular customers. All while giving the Business Owner real time reports on every single sale happening in their shop.
StoreFront, quite simply put, is the best solution for an African based retail business to ensure that they achieve effective digitization and complete business oversight. It is fully functional as a mobile app and it also has a web based platform that can be accessed with any web browser. StoreFront Mall also acts as an extension of StoreFront which grants users ecommerce functionality at the tap of a button.
Market Women and Dynamic Pricing was originally published in VerifiBuy Inc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.