How Do Price Wars Affect Affiliates?

I read Fast Company online and offline for their interesting articles, and one came across in the last week or two that made me wonder…

Here is the gist of the article: Basically several retailers in an effort to sell more books, drastically slashed their prices. Of course none of the others were going to be outdone, and so they slashed prices and offered more incentives. This is all great for those of us who are purchasing the books for Christmas presents or to finally be able to get a good book for under $25, but, wait…many of us are also selling books online as well!

If Amazon jumps in this price war (which they did) then how does this affect our sales? Well, for sure we won’t be getting the same affiliate commission, but, not all of us are strictly using Amazon when selling books. Some of us sell for other retailers. We cannot compete with the prices they are selling for, nor can we give away or entice the same way they are, right? WRONG!

In a post several weeks ago, I mentioned that cutting your price too low or even at all was not a good business decision. Cutting prices and charging more for the same product are choices we all must make when the product is ours or when we are authorized to resell it. How do you keep the price of your product or raise the price for the same item and still get the sales to roll in? Easy. Sweeten the deal.

Sear’s did just that when they got in the price war over books a few weeks ago. What Sear’s did, and is very smart, is that they had already slashed the price of their books to around 40% of what they normally sell at, but, because they were unwilling to be outdone by other retailers, they also sweetened the deal by offering customers $9 off their next online purchase if they emailed a copy of their receipt to their designated customer service dept. How smart was that? Essentially, you could purchase a book for $8.99 and then get $9 back from Sears to use on other purchases.

Keeping this in mind, what kind of offers do you currently have that you could sweeten by adding another digital product that your customer would find really valuable? Maybe giving them the choice between products? Its all about how we see things, and how we allow others to see it as well. If we see the glass as half full, chances are that others will too, especially if we sweeten the pot by offering them things that they already want.

I would be interested in knowing what you think about all the different price wars that have been going on lately, because the retailers are not the only ones trying to out do one another.

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Tagged as: affiliate marketing, price wars, selling digital products