We play a form of poker or brinkmanship with our customers during our Dutch Auction. We know our bow ties are worth every cent of their RRP but we also know the internet is a place of fierce competition. We know who our customers are but our customers don't know who each other are. We know how many customers we have and what bow ties they have been looking at on the site, but they don't know we know. And, until recently, we didn't publish our stock levels, so our customers didn't know what stock we had and so it was a game. A trap. Who else is out there that might bid for YOUR bow tie and how much of a game are you willing to play in order to get a more substantial discount. It was a game I first witnessed as a university student at the Sydney Fish Markets observing a Dutch Auction on fish. If everyone colludes then perhaps they can extract a much better price, but if you can't collude, as we hope the world wide web offers in terms of bidders, then you are forced to make a decision, do I wait, or do I pounce?
On a more obscure bow tie like teal satin silk that is an easier game to play, because we both know that the world of teal bow ties is not a deep one. But on our limited edition silks where we know you just can't get this anywhere else in the world, well, that's a slightly different story. For example, left to right on the three bow ties below there are 1,3 and 1 units remaining respectively. What are you going to do? Are you really going to wait? How many people will read this blog post today? Will they decide it's time to act? When is it time to act? Only you can decide that.
No comments:
Post a Comment