Too expensive

[dsrtao]

When a company that does a thriving business on the web has a product line that they will not sell you via web-based ordering, that product line is too expensive.

Corollary: when none of their competitors will display prices either, the technology is too expensive.

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

Caveat - if there are MANY competitors for the same marketplace, that phenomenon is fairly common.

[dsrtao]

I'm not seeing it. There are a bazillion places that will sell me, for instance, random cables and adapters. They all offer direct ordering over the web; the only time they want you to call is if you want something custom made for you or you want a quantity discount for a quantity they didn't expect anyone to buy. I can order hundred thousand dollar computers over the net, although I expect on an order that large they'll call to confirm details and to make sure my credit card will stand it.

But the particular storage technology I'm looking at has prices which appear to be unavailable except by talking to a salescritter; there are certainly twenty or fifty places to buy something similar, and they all act this way. Since I can't price it easily, it's unlikely to go onto my comparison sheet except to note that nobody is sufficiently confident in themselves to give me a price.

What sort of thing were you thinking of?

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

My industry, for example. CMMS - in the tier we're in,there are roughly 300 different products (this is only in the tier we're in, mind you). Almost none of them provide pricing online, simply because it's the easiest way to get undercut.

[dsrtao]

Is that a refutation of "too expensive", though?

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

Think so. Not so much that it is a given refutation, but the global assumption doesn't take other potential reasons into account.

Storage!

[metageek.livejournal.com]

My impression is that the custom in any market is influenced by the practices of the first company in that market. In high-end storage, that's obviously going to be IBM. Any company that entered that market had to deal with customers whose expectations were set by IBM. And this applies recursively, of course; EMC modeled IBM, and anybody who came after EMC modeled after them both. Even small companies have to act big and staid, or customers won't take them seriously. Plus, of course, they can't afford to give up the asymmetric information advantage that everybody else has.

I've seen this happen at a couple of places I worked. At InSoft, we were selling LAN-based videoconferencing software; but the ISDN videoconferencing customers were used to buying hardware, so pretty much the only sales we could make were when we either went in as a VAR or partnered with a VAR. And, at Centive, which founded the incentive management market, they started out having to produce free proof-of-concept implementations to make sales. When competitors emerged, they had to do the same thing—and then Centive couldn't stop doing them, even when they started going after larger customers, where a proof-of-concept was much more expensive to produce.