Pricing impacts everything from sell-through rates and wholesale relationships to the perceived value of your brand. Explore top pricing management strategies and tools to develop the best pricing model for your business.
What is pricing management?
Pricing management is the process of strategizing to improve pricing, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities and improve profitability. Treat your pricing strategy as you would treat a living document. It shouldn’t be set in stone and your prices might need to change over time due to sales trends, market trends, brand value, sourcing and several other factors. And no matter what your prices are, one of the fastest ways to increase revenue and improve profitability is identifying opportunities to sell more merchandise to clients. Think about your clients and their customers, examine your offerings and come up with the best adjacent goods (cross-selling) and higher-priced alternatives (upselling) to suit their needs. Remember, the most successful strategies center on creating value. Always ask yourself if the products in question are truly what your client and their customers need.
Improve your pricing with B2B eCommerce software
Get rid of those Excel spreadsheets and use your wholesale eCommerce platform instead. Digital wholesale solutions minimize the risk of human error and help you save time and improve accuracy with real-time updates to both pricing, product and other key inventory information. Say goodbye to costly mistakes; whether a buyer is shopping your virtual showroom, shoppable video or digital linesheets, you can be sure your pricing is always up to date. That means no more phone calls to verify a price or confirm availability – and no more inventory report emails in the mornings.
What’s more, real-time pricing information creates a seamless sales experience to work with customers in time zones all over the globe! For example, you can use NuORDER’s cloud-based platform to share accurate pricing, and to let buyers browse and shop in their local currencies. The greater the convenience, the greater the opportunity for making the sale. The best B2B eCommerce platforms also allow you to set custom pricing to speed up operations as you sell to retailers of different relationships, contracts and sizes.
Finally, when you’re given access to in-depth data and analytics tools, you’re armed with knowledge that can help you adjust your pricing as needed in the future:
- Look for sales trends that could mean prices are making a significant impact, whether positive or negative.
- Pay attention to products with the highest sell-through rates. Are they selling well because they’re bestsellers or are they winning products that have been priced too low? How could your pricing be improved in the future, whether for staple pieces or upcoming collections?
B2B eCommerce pricing support:
- Fewer errors
- More time for your teams
- Greater accuracy
- Local currencies
- Custom pricing
- Including country-specific pricing
- Data and analytics
Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities
Part of gaining a better understanding of your pricing, is gaining the ability to identify healthy upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Once reserved for retail, upselling and cross-selling is now a big part of the wholesale business too, thanks to B2B eCommerce. Get the most out of your wholesale eCommerce platform by identifying these revenue-increasing opportunities.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Create custom linesheets for select retailers or segments of wholesale clients and merchandise featured SKUs alongside upselling and cross-selling opportunities. For example, you might want to feature your higher-end yoga pants alongside a comparable bestselling style to entice buyers to try the product. To cross-sell, you might feature your limited-edition artist collaboration yoga mats alongside your best-selling yoga pants.
- Use the whiteboard tool to share the story behind your collection alongside featured products. It’s an opportunity to create a more cohesive connection between specific SKUs.
- Think in terms of upselling and cross-selling as you merchandise the products on your wholesale eCommerce platform’s homepage.
- Use your eCommerce platform to send personalized marketing campaigns to buyers between seasons. Fill the emails with upsell and/or cross-sell opportunities to encourage in-season sales. For example, you can offer styling suggestions to present an activewear look alongside workout or outdoor gear. To consider extra products for their buys, your clients need to understand the full scope of their context and their relevance to their customers
- Review your B2B eCommerce platform’s products, services, training and resources to uncover other creative ways to sell your clients additional products that are well-suited to their needs.
Common pricing mistakes (and how to avoid them)
- Leave cost plus pricing strategies in the past. Start structuring your pricing in terms of the perceived value of your brand instead. It usually presents the opportunity to increase the suggested retail value of your products which can increase revenue and profitability for you and your wholesale clients. Many factors impact the perceived value of your brand – from marketing campaigns and packaging to your business’ reputation. But it’s also like the conundrum of the chicken and the egg. Product pricing affects value perception too.
- Purposely setting prices to be lower than the competition isn’t a winning strategy for contemporary, premium and luxury brands. Instead of focusing on every dollar, think about how you can elevate your brand in the eyes of wholesale clients and prospects instead. It’s easy to make the sale when your value is truly understood.
- Setting uniform prices across the board. Think about the contracts you have with your wholesale clients. They differ in many ways, so shouldn’t your pricing differ too? Let’s say you have a hiking shoe brand and it’s carried in mom-and-pop outdoor retailers and global multibrand e-commerce stores too. Segment your clients to offer the most suitable wholesale prices for different client types.
Take your pricing management to the next level with NuORDER – request a demo.
NuORDER is a B2B eCommerce platform and marketplace, connecting retailers and brands and streamlining the wholesale process for virtual, hybrid and in-person market appointments. The NuORDER platform offers a seamless and collaborative way to do business with interactive and customizable solutions, easy payments, real-time inventory insights, comprehensive data and more for increasingly informed buying decisions.
