The Benefits of Pricing Software for Your Business

For business owners, tracking sales figures and pricing activity in a spreadsheet can be a tedious and infuriating experience. You develop spreadsheet formulas, input numbers manually, and have to personally extract and analyze data to see the impact your pricing decisions have on your month-over-month sales volume.

Fortunately, pricing software provides an easy-to-use and efficient solution to save you the need to perform all that manual data management. The time savings are just scratching the surface of the many benefits that pricing software provides, so let's look at some of the other ways it can make your business run more smoothly and efficiently…

You can more easily understand the impact of your pricing decisions.
Picking the ideal price for your products is a tough decision to make, especially in highly competitive industries where a mistake can send potential customers straight to your competitors. On the occasions when you believe that a change in price is in order, you want to be able to clearly understand the effect your changes in price have on your sales volume.

Pricing software includes analytics tools that allow you to track sales volume, and determine the impact those changes have on your bottom line. You can monitor the size over a long period as well, to determine if any customer churn you see is a short-term or long-term effect of the changes.

You can automate the use of advanced pricing methods.
Depending on the business you're in, you may offer your customers buying options such as discounts, long-term promotions, or bundle pricing to increase volume. Rather than trying to hammer this out manually in a spreadsheet, pricing software allows you to automate the process by defining rules that automatically apply these advanced pricing methods during the buying process.

You can customize pricing for specific classes of customers.
Your customer base likely has a range of buying behaviors, preferred products, and other customer-specific behavior. Most pricing software includes tools that allow you to customize their shopping experience by defining customer classes and assigning unique pricing, promotions, and even featured products to each.

It helps you avoid costly data entry mistakes.
One of the drawbacks to being human is that it means you occasionally make mistakes. Even the sharpest, most detail-oriented amongst us will sometimes enter a wrong number here and there, especially if their entire job mainly entails entering numbers into spreadsheets and using them to do calculations. Pricing software removes that possibility by handling all the data entry and tracking work for you.

It can automate issues arising from pricing conflicts.
Promotions are a great way to drive business, but can at times lead to overlap where, if not checked in any way, could lead to your customers combining offers to get much more significant discounts than you intended them to, possibly even receiving goods below cost. The issue could be addressed manually, but this approach could lead to mistakes or even confusion of your sales staff.

Pricing software addresses this by providing tools that allow you to limit the use of promotions automatically. This will help you prevent overlap or overuse, such as customers reusing advertisements that are only meant to be applied once per sale or once per customer.

Conclusion
These are just a few of the benefits that pricing and print shop software can provide for your business. Instead of wasting time manually controlling the pricing process, the automation and rules that pricing software offers will make your business run more efficiently and cut down on losses resulting from costly pricing mistakes.