Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Who’s The Cheapest Of Them All? Not for the first time this year, a survey has shown that a certain e-commerce giant, famed for offering better value than anywhere else, comes in a poor second or third when it comes to offering the lowest prices. Bargains-hunter site Shopsavvy (shopsavvy/) have just completed a survey of popular consumer goods across seven categories - computers, electronics, entertainment, home and garden, kids, and sports and outdoors – and found Wal-Mart offered lower prices across the board compared to Best Buy and Amazon. (pymnts/news/2014/app-data-shows-wal-mart-outpricing-competitors/#.VIhABNKsUsc ) This comes as no surprise to me. I’ve been monitoring ebook prices , and found that, even with Amazon’s Most Favoured Nation clause which dictates indie authors may not list on another retailer at a lower price than on Amazon, the Everything Store often does not have the lowest price ebooks. In the US Amazon holds its own best, thanks to a common policy among most retailers that $0.99 is the lowest price option available. But even here we often find Txtr US (us.txtr/) has ebooks as low as $0.75 and even $0.60. Likewise the Smashwords partner stores Inktera (inktera/) and Versent (versentbooks/). Very few indie authors are in the Books-A-Million store (booksamillion/ebooks), but when they are it’s quite usual to see a price point of just $0.79. In the UK Txtr (gb.txtr/) again regularly undercuts Kindle UK’s bottom line price of £0.77. So does Nook UK and Apple. Nook UK often carries titles at 75p, 65p or even 60p. Apple has a policy I would love to see implemented at Amazon - that all list prices end in a nine. Apart from anything else it keeps the product pages looking professional. When you see ebook prices on the Amazon sites at CDN$1.11 or AU$1.13 or 102.73 rupees it screams out that this is an indie title and the author/publisher has taken the lazy option and set the US price on Amazon and then let Amazon set the other prices against the US dollar. And heres the thing: it’s not just about looking good. It’s about making/losing sales. When we set that .99 price point on the US we do so for a reason. Because it’s a psychological ceiling to the buyer. $0.99 is under a dollar. $1.03 is over a dollar. $2.99 is clearly cheaper than three dollars. $3.23 is not. You think it doesn’t matter? Then why not set your US price at US$1.03 or US$3.23 instead of the 0.99 or 2.99 you carefully chose? Exactly. It matters. And it matters all the more in Australia, where lax price listing in KDP can send your Kindle AU ebooks soaring over the psychological ceiling you set for the US, seriously impacting your sales. Amazon already makes selling in Australia that much harder by setting the lowest price for a 70% royalty at AU$3.99 on Kindle AU when typically the same title will be available on Apple AU, Txtr AU, Kobo AU, Google Play AU, as well as Kobo partner stores like Angus & Robertson and Bookworld, etc, at just AU$2.99. For those who chose to let Amazon set the price against the US dollar that AU$3.99 ebook, already obliged to be a dollar more than on Kindle US or Kindle Canada (and no, currency exchange rates do not justify this difference), shoots up to around the AU$4.40 mark on the Kindle AU site. An AU$4.99 title will appear at about AU$5.50 if you take the lazy pricing route. Another factor impacting pricing on the Kindle UK and EU stores has been VAT. When you set your list price in KDP, Amazon adds the VAT to the list price showing. So even if you carefully chose 99p (£0.99) as your UK price point in your dashboard the price showing on the UK product page would be £1.02 or £1.03. This matter resolves itself in a few weeks when Amazon adopts a new policy of setting UK and EU prices on the product page at the price we chose in the dashboard. But be warned even then if you are letting Amazon set your UK/EU price by the US dollar rate the price showing will still likely be an untidy one. The new change kicks in from 01 January 2015 and is going to cause a lot of confusion for indie authors selling in the UK and EU with regard to the royalty they will receive, because while the actual royalty rate remains the same most of us will see our monthly payout from dramatically unless we carefully adjust our KDP list prices. I’ll take a closer look at this development later this month. Meantime, pop along to your Kindle listings store by store, country by country, and see if you have a tidy list price below the psychological buy ceiling, or a messy one above that ceiling that could be deterring readers. Remember, what you set in the KDP dashboard will often not be what the reader is seeing the other end. You can do so via the KDP dashboard, or simply go the store direct. Open the Amazon store where you are (you may need to try a different browser to avoid Amazon re-directing you to your local store again), find one of your titles, and check the URL address. Where it says (for US) Amazon (dot) com (slash) your title, simply change the (dot) com coding for each country. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) co (dot) uk for the British store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) ca for the Canada store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) com (dot) au for the Australia store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) in for the India store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) com (dot) br for the Brazil store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) co (dot) mx for the Mexico store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) co (dot) jp for the Japan store. Change Amazon (dot) com to (dot) de for the Germany store. For other EU countries - Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands the codes are respectively ES, IT, FR and NL. Remember too that you can set prices in countries like India and Brazil at the 35% level while still setting for 70% in the bigger Kindle stores. As Jim Giammatteo reported yesterday, Draft2Digital will be introducing regional pricing options next year for the retailers it serves. A big step forward. Great news for those taking the global markets seriously. But for those who arent even bothering to set regional prices on Amazon its pretty academic.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 16:50:41 +0000
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