Get set to master the art of Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing strategies with Luigi and Burc Tanir, the e-commerce pricing expert and CEO of Prisync.
Learn how to avoid common pitfalls most retailers fall into during the holiday season and how to strategically utilise agile pricing for success. Burc elaborates on why merchants should focus more on margins and volumes rather than just the top-line numbers.
This episode gives you a deep understanding of how to make the most out of these crucial shopping days!
Ever wondered how to utilise Black Friday and Cyber Monday to acquire new customers? Luigi and Burc uncover the secrets of this strategy, discussing the concept of loss leadership and how retailers can effectively use it, provided they have a well-thought-out plan.
Additionally, understanding the automation of pricing for a competitive edge is also explored with emphasis on product sourcing at competitive prices and leveraging automation for competitor price benchmarking.
By the end of this episode, you'll have a well-rounded understanding of pricing strategies to stand out in the market.
Join us for insightful discussions and strategies to ace your holiday season sales!
Get set to master the art of Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing strategies with Luigi and Burc Tanir, the e-commerce pricing expert and CEO of Prisync.
Learn how to avoid common pitfalls most retailers fall into during the holiday season and how to strategically utilise agile pricing for success. Burc elaborates on why merchants should focus more on margins and volumes rather than just the top-line numbers.
This episode gives you a deep understanding of how to make the most out of these crucial shopping days!
Ever wondered how to utilise Black Friday and Cyber Monday to acquire new customers? Luigi and Burc uncover the secrets of this strategy, discussing the concept of loss leadership and how retailers can effectively use it, provided they have a well-thought-out plan.
Additionally, understanding the automation of pricing for a competitive edge is also explored with emphasis on product sourcing at competitive prices and leveraging automation for competitor price benchmarking.
By the end of this episode, you'll have a well-rounded understanding of pricing strategies to stand out in the market.
Join us for insightful discussions and strategies to ace your holiday season sales!
Hi, welcome to the Big Commerce Podcast. Welcome to, Brian, the episode of the Big Commerce Podcast. I'm your co-host, Luigi, and in today's episode I'm joined by Borch from Pricing. Borch, often known as the e-commerce pricing guy, is the CEO of Pricing, a dynamic pricing software for e-commerce. It already has hundreds of e-commerce merchants around 60 countries worldwide and in today's episode we cover Black Friday side, Monday pricing, Specifically common mistakes that merchants make during this peak season, effective tactics that merchants could take advantage of to avoid said mistakes, and how agile pricing during the holiday season can help merchants win. I hope you enjoy the episode, Borch, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Thank you for having me again, Luigi Pleasure.
Speaker 1:No worries, always enjoyed talking to you. We were just talking about the last few months, any e-commerce being up and down, being a bit quiet, being a bit busy. Now we're in Q4, which is silly season for all of us in e-commerce. We're going to be talking about pricing around Black Friday side, monday. Some of the mistakes that merchants can avoid and also the importance of agile pricing during, I guess, not just Black Friday, but also the entire holiday season going through to January sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, always say to the chat this quarter also is a pretty busy quarter for me because obviously people sort of see this quarter as the pricing quarter, let's say so I think how people somehow react. They sort of think that pricing is something like a sprint rather than a monotone. So they discount, and discount during November, maybe October, maybe September, and then for the rest of the year they apply list price and so on. Occasionally they discount, but I'm actually a big believer of like a monotone way of pricing, so we actually always come up with optimized pricing throughout the season, throughout the years. So, yeah, but I can understand that people pay more attention to discounting and pricing this time of the year, and this time of the year is the time when I also show up in these type of podcasts, webinars, et cetera, more often than before. Yeah, that's also a good thing for me. So it's sometimes tricky to manage my calendar these days, but that's always fun to chat about pricing for me.
Speaker 1:Well, the reason why you're so busy this quarter and obviously you mentioned about pricing. Excuse me, let me start again the reason why you are so busy during this quarter and you talk a lot about pricing is because you are the e-commerce pricing guy. So, for those that don't know you, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself and the company that you founded?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, well, pleasure. As you said, lüge, I'm Burçalem, the CEO of pricing, one of the co-founders and the CEO of pricing, which is actually an e-commerce pricing software. So we primarily help e-commerce merchants of all sizes from all around the world benchmark their prices against their competition. So, instead of doing that all manually, like as they did in the back in the old days, we actually helped them generate all that competitive pricing intelligence in seconds, in minutes or you name it like in a nicely actually displayable web dashboard. And then we actually take a step further from that and we help those merchants automatically reprice their products depending on their competition, depending on their you know target profit margins, as we also take their cost of goods sold into account. So it's essentially a pricing automation software.
Speaker 2:And, you know, since I've been managing this company, let's say, with my colleagues, with my team, for about 10 years or so, I sort of kind of technically became the e-commerce pricing guy because I have been sharing a lot of content on LinkedIn, twitter, here and there, and those are obviously like do business mostly about pricing. And you know, I started to get invited to, you know, webinars like this, sort of like podcasts, this and that. So, yeah, eventually I decided to call myself the e-commerce pricing guy, because I really believe that I am that. So, yeah, here.
Speaker 2:I am also like talking to you as the e-commerce pricing guy.
Speaker 1:I think what you've kind of been able to position yourself as is really important, because I think you know e-commerce purelyヽ A lot of our listeners are small meat enterprises. You know they don't have necessarily large merchandise departments or pricing departments or you know, so for them, really they are every day is kind of a bit of a it's a sprint, it is a marathon, but they're sprinting every day, you know, every day they're running and so sometimes they don't haven't got the time or the ability to kind of just take a step back and say, right, how can I optimize my pricing strategy?
Speaker 1:Because most people think pricing strategy is well, you know, if I've got a commoditized product, I've got to compete against my competitors. If I've got a unique product, I can charge a bit more. But it's very much on kind of you know, the top line. What I like about the way that you and pricing as well approaches the pricing discussion is also around margins. It's like you know it's asking questions do you need to reduce that price for that product? Because maybe that product doesn't need to have its price reduced, maybe that product has a nice margin or maybe that you know the volume is going well. So you kind of put a slightly different spin in it.
Speaker 1:I'd recommend anybody who hasn't listened to the episode with fortune will link to it and show notes to go back and listen to the previous episode, because today, specifically around Black Friday, cyber Monday, which is coming up at the end of this month, so let's, let's kind of jump in, because I think you know everyone's starting to kind of gear up and everyone's, you know, buying as much as they can, I guess, inventory. You know they're getting ready for the, you know the packaging and the extra resources and so on, and and the merchandising. But let's talk specifically about pricing and maybe some of the mistakes that you see merchants either make or you know as susceptible to making, or maybe pricing mistakes that are quite easy to make.
Speaker 2:You see, around this period, yeah, well, I obviously do, and that's that's what I actually try to help our merchants and all merchants that I can actually touch, not necessarily as clients, also as friends, as you know, maybe like just linking connections occasionally. So I think to name a few. I think that the most common mistake I come across, nearly in 100% of cases, to be honest, is the blanket discounting, as we call it. So like I don't really see any logical basis and data driven basis on coming up with a 30% of 50% of across all I don't know t-shirts, all laptops, etc. Because all those products are not logically, like in a data driven way, are not priced the same, they don't really have the exact cost, exact margin, etc. So how come can you really make the very same discount on each and every one of those? So discount should be actually applied on on product level. Or maybe you can categorize, you can segment your products depending on their profit margins, depending on their competence, and then maybe you can come up with a certain, you know, blanket, let's say, discounting for that segment, but you should never really apply something like 30% of across the store or something like that. So this blanket discounting thing should die, in my opinion, and the way to really kill it off is to really segment your products depending on their firstly, competitiveness, on their profit margins etc. And they're really trying to come up with maybe 5%, 10%, maybe 50% of groups and then taking that 50% of group more aggressively and then just leaving the 5% 10% of group maybe more silently at the back of your store.
Speaker 2:This blanket discounting is one thing and also another thing that I also commonly see is, you know, as you also said, people don't really think about inventory side of things before really pricing things. So they actually don't even maybe, like in some cases they don't even consider how much stock they have for certain products, for certain brands, and they still apply the most aggressive discounting that they can apply in day one of some of the marathon or some of the spring. So, depending on how you see it, holiday season is also like a you know marathon. So it's not just one hour one day. It takes a few days, like now in our today's environment. It takes a few weeks, few months occasionally. So I mean, before really seeing the velocity, before you really seeing your sales velocity, I mean how many units you are going to sell on a daily basis at that price point. You shouldn't really put your most aggressive discount in day one, because if you do so, you might eventually let's say we have two months of holiday season, two months of discounting periods some merchants and you know these are actually very, very common they come up with a very, very aggressive discount in day one, day two, day three, let's say you have two months and in week one they actually go out of stock for that product and even if they continue to generate organic or paid demand for that product during the rest of the holiday season, they cannot fulfill that demand. I mean, even if they were not already going to fulfill that maybe stock later on, they could have at least maybe kept the product at a higher price and go out of stock in two months, within two weeks, at a maybe full price, maybe at a higher price and that, would you know, maintain a healthy profit margin. So this actually, let's say um Lack of connection between inventory is also one of the other mistakes that I come to see.
Speaker 2:So inventory management is very crucial in also your pricing management, especially during high demand periods like holiday season and the other maybe opportunity cost, I would say. So missed opportunity in this holiday season is that people oftentimes forget to tie their discounting strategies with their marketing strategies. So they sort of market their whole store, market their whole campaigns etc. And then they forget to actually again segment their products, segment those brands where they have better prices and actually they really don't allocate their marketing budget accordingly. They'll actually allocate their marketing budget equally across the whole assortment, so they actually fail to maybe get better return in investment. So this is, I think, more trickier than the first two, but I think first two are really basic e-commerce 101 management principles in my opinion.
Speaker 1:So one thing that you mentioned there was kind of you know, being able to manage inventory and kind of that. Normally within a business is sometimes managed by different departments, so who actually owns the pricing discussion within a company, within an e-commerce operation.
Speaker 2:Well, I like to say that the pricing is a team sport, honestly. So it's not like tennis, it's not like, you know, golf or anything, so it's mostly like a team sport. So, in that case, if you're lucky enough, if you're actually a sizable company where you can, you know, set up a pricing team, even a pricing employee well, you should do. But even if you don't really have one and if you really don't have the budget for it, let's at least make it a shared responsibility across marketing, sales, advertising, etc. Because unless you do so, people will just manage their own KPIs in silos, so marketing will just focus on getting you know demand, without the profitability in mind. You know the purchasing team will always try to actually get the best deals possible without really also thinking the pricing side of things, so they only think about buying but not selling. But when you actually take this into consideration as a funnel where you would just source products, list products you know, bidon products and then eventually sell those products, it actually makes a lot of sense. So, like my, my actually advice would be to see this like a shared responsibility across the team, even if you already have maybe a department or a personnel for that. For example, I think, like, like I said earlier, the big, the biggest opportunity missed to me in today's inflationary environment, especially where, you know, consumers are terribly like price sensitive. Unfortunately, marketing teams are missing the cruciality of price competitiveness, pricing, so they can really use pricing as a marketing weapon in today's environment, but they are not necessarily doing so. So if you, for example, had kind of like a pricing board, pricing team, pricing project team, I don't know that meets, I don't know, regularly, once in every week, once in every month or so, I think that could really, you know, generate some new ideas for your growth initiatives.
Speaker 2:So a short answer I think it's a team sport. It should be shared responsibilities, even if you have a responsible or not. But I think it shouldn't definitely be just a financing, really like that you calculate in a bitters, in Excel files, etc. It should really be a living organism. So it shouldn't be just an Excel cell that's static, that leaves there for maybe like months or years In today's again inflationary environment. No, pricing really leaves for months, but people still are used to that, so they don't really ever think of changing those prices more often than before, using those changes as a marketing weapon or something. So, yeah, I think it should be a shared responsibility again.
Speaker 1:We'll get on to how pricing can help. Merchant pricing can help merchants shortly.
Speaker 1:But a question for you, kind of in. So the cost of acquisition for the customers acquire new customers is quite high at the moment and I think one of the tactics that some brands can use predominantly, I guess the ones that have a bit more of a stronger relationship between brand and customer you know we will discount to get new customers Because once we get customers it's a way of kind of bring customers in, we can increase the lifetime value. So and I'm not a fan of discounting at all, because I think if you're competing or price, you've got nothing else to compete on.
Speaker 2:Really you can't you know, you've got no unfair advantage.
Speaker 1:You've got no unique selling proposition, Unless that's. All you do is pricing, and anybody can, can you know, lose money on a product. So from that perspective, you know what are your thoughts around using campaigns such as Black Friday, Sub Monday as a customer acquisition channel.
Speaker 2:Well it's, I think, only makes sense if you have a further plan. So if you only just see this like in a dummy way, where you just generate the demand and then you just repeat the same thing with discounts etc. At what lifetime of your consumers, well the numbers won't really add up. But, for example, one one very specific tactic that we occasionally apply with also our merchants is called loss leadership. So if you, for example, have a QVL item in your assortment, let's say you're a supermarket and you're selling eggs and milks right, so people are really anchored towards the pricing of your milks and eggs. And if you really discount them, people buy those products very frequently. So they will visit your supermarket and if it's actually a physical visit, it makes a lot of sense because you have the right, we have the actually right, maybe moment right opportunity to upsell them, to cross sell them because they're already in the store. The same might also apply in the context of e-commerce. So you say, have a certain amount of stock that can be kind of like eliminated, that can be actually sold at a acceptable like loss margin With only with an hypothesis of also cross-selling higher margin products to that assortment, to that actually demand might eventually make sense.
Speaker 2:For example, one use case we had with one of our consumer electronics retailer was actually where they had, for example, some discounts with iPhones like an iPhone's, really discounts, right. So like they did, maybe a small a German retailer they actually made, with permission from Apple, I think, made a small discount and when people saw that apples are discounted, they rushed into that website. I think this was only applicable to 5,000 or 50,000 Apple iPhones. But when they had all those sales made, they also had the chance to sell accessories, cables like very, very cheap China imported I don't know few pence items at 10 euros, 20 euros. So they actually recovered that loss leadership from iPhones via cables, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So what I'm saying is that if you really tie this down to an upsell strategy, a bundling strategy or something that would eventually improve your bottom line, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:But if you really do this as just like a spraying and praying I mean you just will make a discount, people will just come and buy and then you don't really have another plan and you will just do the same thing repeatedly it eventually won't really make sense and that's really a very common reason why some companies have been actually going bankrupt this year and in the previous years.
Speaker 2:So, like especially some D2C brands, for example, that have been growing on pay debts that were maybe like fueled by free cash that we had during COVID, like 2020, 2021, there were no interest rates, so the cash was almost free, so they really doubled down on discounting pay debts et cetera, so they actually grew their audiences, grew their actually top lines, but when the cash became kind of expensive in today's environment, they had no chance to actually offer those discounts to their addicted, let's say, consumer base. So the demand really dried off and they are keep now going bankrupt. All those D2C stars of that period, for example, are having this fate, but also not only D2C brands but also some multi-brand retailers are also going through this. So I am not against discounts as you do, as you are, but again, I am against discounts where it's not really tied to a bigger plan.
Speaker 1:I've read kind of about a couple of D2C brands in North America that either kind of go into bankruptcy protection or have felt for that particular reason. And just on your point around the iPhone, the conundrum that people have, the challenge, I guess, is if you said to somebody, apple iPhone 900 euros and you get $50 of free accessories, that's not always as attractive as you said as like an $850 euro iPhone, maybe it's got a 50. Because people know that iPhones and Apple products aren't normally discounted. And to your point around conditioning customers, apple have been very careful to condition their customers to know that those products cannot be discounted. So if they ever are discounted, you know that it's an exception and it's not gonna happen all the time. Whereas if you've got sale after sale and discount after discount, then your customers are just gonna become conditioned, like you say, to expect the next discount and actually you know, anchoring the price becomes in some respects, you know, futile, because your customers are just gonna wait for the next email to come through or the next coupon code.
Speaker 2:But the only legit way, maybe potentially a legit way to really maintain that customer like discounted to consumer base, is to really limit those discounts to maybe very specific product of like groups of products, for example, one product out of thousands of instruments, I don't know, maybe just a specific brand per one month.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you really do that you can at least, you know, make sure that you will maybe potentially make less margin from that brand, less margin maybe occasionally lost from that brand that month, but maybe, like, if the numbers really add up, you might just get some additional revenue from those, you know, maybe newly acquired or maybe newly re-engaged buyers that can also buy other stuff from your store. But you should really need to, you know, prove that hypothesis. You shouldn't really, just, like I say, spray and pray. I mean everybody can, you know, assume this to happen. It doesn't happen all the time. So you know, you should really come up with such an hypothesis of like upselling, cross-selling your customer base where you also make discounts. You should really measure your lifetime values if it really works. If it doesn't, yeah, it's just really a race to the bottom and race to bankruptcy nowadays.
Speaker 1:One of the fundamentals of marketing is is understanding your customer and then tailoring the marketing to your customer. So on that basis, you know a good business should be segmenting its customer base, understanding what each segment wants, what it's. You know the drivers are for that, for that customer segment. How important is it to do the same with kind of your products, because we've said that you know it's, you can. You know you shouldn't do a blanket discount. You know 20% off Shareds or 25% off BrandX.
Speaker 1:It is, I guess, getting to understand your customer, the customer behaviors, how, what products they're likely to buy or what combination. And then, really, for the merchandising team, go back to your point at the beginning, around kind of it being a team effort, the merchandising and buying department coming together and saying, right, how can we segment our product portfolio so that you know this segment of products are attractive to this by customer profile and this one to this customer profile, and then you can tailor your promotions around that. So, like you say, you know, maybe with the same brand you've got three or four different discount levels because actually you're bundling them together, whether that's as a loss leader or actually as part of saying, yeah, we know that 80% of sales with this product in it come with these two or three ancillary products.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, I, like I said in the video, like beginning in the opening, product segmentation on pricing is, I think, vital and is also necessary and useful. So one way to, for example, see this is that when you also combine that with, for example, customer segmentation because that's what we also did in the past for a few of our clients together with some merchandising automation solutions, for example, depending, like if you have the data that we can collect, which is the competitiveness of your products let's say, out of 100, say, one of your products is 10% cheaper than the market average, but the other one is 10% higher than the market average. So imagine that you can calculate this index value for all your maybe thousands of products and if you combine that maybe value per product with your consumer's purchase behavior, you might somehow spot groups who are preferably buying products that have an index value below 90%. So you can really spot a group which buys from you only if it's very competitive versus the market, but whereas you might also, for example, spot some other buyers who don't really care about that value and they actually also buy from you, even if the product is, for example, more expensive. So the best way to, for example, use. That insight is, for example, maybe using coupon codes, let's say, instead of discounts, for that very specific segment of buyers who only buy from you when you make a discount. Because if you make a discount, let's say, you actually decreased a product's price from 110 to 100 and if you market that to all your customers instead of to a segment of your customers, some people who would still buy the product from you at 110 will then buy the product from you at 100, so you will actually leave 10 dollars on the table. But instead, if you group that for example, customers who buy from you only if you are really competitive and if you just, let's say, send an email marketing a campaign to that group by saying that, well, if you, you know, use this coupon code for that product group, you can buy this at maybe 100 instead of 100 times, by doing that, you can really somehow achieve the same number of maybe product sold by only making the discounts where necessary. So this is just a one very specific and real life example of product and customer segmentation and another, another smart way to do this.
Speaker 2:Segmentation on product level is also maybe. We discuss this in the earlier podcast, but let me repeat that because I I I have been seeing the strength of this strategy more and more this year. So, for example, on google shopping. So people are just looking for products and they typically compare prices right. So they actually search for a product. They mostly not always, but mostly pick the best price available there and convert from that. You know merchant.
Speaker 2:So if you have 5000 products and if you are not really the best price merchant for all those 5000 but say only for 1000 where you're also profitable, it makes a lot of sense to really double down on those 1000 products instead of the full 5000, so that you would know that you would eventually like technically shout to your consumers that you have the best price for those items. So you would just agree, really try to convince them to convert from you. But if you do the same for those remaining 4000 products where you don't necessarily the best price, it will mean that like, imagine this like people will just still market those products. Your consumer will just click to your cpc listing so you will just bid for those clicks. That will just appear on the chrome browser of your consumers as just as a tap to be closed because you will have another, you know, tap next to yours from a merchant that's more competitively priced than you.
Speaker 2:So if you really use that segmentation insight and if you really manage your google ad campaigns depending on your product price, competitiveness and profitability, well it's, it's it's actually proven return on investment improvement and this is actually what we have been experimenting with a lot of ppc agencies across the world right now. So they are actually using this insight, like competitiveness, profitability, in their google shopping campaigns. So, like these are just maybe just two specific segmentation ideas around product pricing.
Speaker 1:I'm really glad that you mentioned, kind of you know, when you're talking about Google Shopping and pay-per-click, because pricing at the end of the day also affects, like you said, a marketing strategy, how the product is perceived, how the merchants perceive and, like you said, talking about those tabs, how do you make sure that your tab is the one that isn't closed? And that comes down to marketing, because it's the marketing department's responsibility for getting those points across and making sure that their customer converts. So how can pricing affect a merchant's marketing strategy, specifically around this time of the year?
Speaker 2:Well, like I said, I think the pricing should be profitable at first hand. So I think they should really try to find that sweet spot. I mean, and since we talk about profitability, it also is tied down to cost, and I think this is not just something that can be applied during holiday season, but I think pricing even starts with purchasing, and purchasing really should be about assortment planning as well. So you shouldn't really kind of assume your assortment right. So I mean no consumer website is actually just, you know. I mean those products are deliberately sourced by us. So we actually make a, you know, a relationship with a certain brand. We like their look, we like their I don't know assortment. We buy from them, but nobody forces us to do that, right. So if, for example, a certain brand is no longer profitable to sell, we can eliminate that brand and we can really try to scout for you know, different, less competitive but maybe high demand brands. So by firstly, you know, questioning that part is also important, I think. I think no, not no, but I think this is really a low hanging fruit.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, before really taking your assortment granted is taking your assortment as an assumption you should really also plan for your assortment with pricing in mind, with profitability in mind.
Speaker 2:And let's assume that you actually did that and now you actually already stocked products where you can set prices that will be profitable and competitive at the same time. If you really cannot do that, what I'm saying is that you should just leave those products where you cannot match the market price because there is just maybe one specific merchant who are like, let's say, brothers with that brand, so they are suppliers, so they kind of technically have a black hole. You know just source the products at a very, very competitive cost, so you cannot really compete against those guys. So leave that assortment, maybe for organic demand, get rid of that stock and don't source from them anymore, and then double down on paid promotions for those products, for those brands, where you can really make decent profits while being also competitive. So I think this is really a nice fly view in some way. So double down on products that you can source at a competitive price. So this is actually our first thing procurement operation and then promote products where you are both competitive and profitable and repeat this continuously.
Speaker 1:That's quite a lot for a merchant to take in, so they're going to be busy this time of year.
Speaker 1:They hopefully have learned one or two things about pricing. So how can pricing help them with that? Because someone's going to say I haven't got the bandwidth to be able to do all these things, and I think this is really where something like pricing not necessarily it won't solve, obviously, all the problems around this time of year, but I think the insights that pricing will give your product, will give the merchants will really help them to not necessarily not just stand out from the competition, but I think certainly have some data points and some insights that will add to compete effectively.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the most basic thing that I can say here is that if they are ever doing this manually, like we can at first hand automate it. So if they are, for example, collecting competitor prices for I don't know thousands of products for their tons of competitors on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, in some cases, like dramatically, on a daily basis, I mean I would really recommend them stop doing that and just automate that without maybe with one of our competitors, really, because there's already an affordable automation around that competitor price benchmarking thing. And after that, when you already compile this amount of data, reacting to the market is the, I think, crucial bit. So we, for example, can help them maintain those sweet spots, like competitive and profitable price forms, automatically. So they can set up repricing rules depending on their branding strategies, marketing strategies. They can say stuff like, for example, they don't necessarily need to be the cheapest if they really think that they have the branding power. So they can say I would like to be 10% higher than the market average as long as I have I don't know 50 pounds, 50 dollars, 50 euros profit margin. So they can technically automate all those decisions that they would otherwise do on Excel formulas as far as I can see in the market.
Speaker 2:And the next bit really is to manage their marketing, as we discussed. So after automating all that, they can see which of their products are really cheapest in the market and also profitable. They can use that insight in their marketing campaigns. But really I think the easiest thing that I can tell here is to automate the very essence of a competitive price tracking thing. If they are doing this manually I mean, it's 2023. And it's not too expensive really, considering all the other expenses they have in their business, it makes a lot of sense to automate that bit at least.
Speaker 1:And if you think about it, you know. One of the difficulties I think a lot of people struggle with is quantifying time. You know how long does it take to manage that Excel spreadsheet if you make a mistake, so add up those hours and put a cost to it. It's actually. You know we're spending X amounts of money each month doing this work when actually, if we invested in the system like pricing, not only do we get this automation, but we also get some additional data points to can help us make more informed decisions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, that's all our marketing say honestly. So that's all the stuff that we say. But I really, you know, I'm not sure that I can really explain a caricature in a verbal way, but there is this actually cartoon where people are actually trying to push a square wheel and someone who just has this you know rounded wheel approaching them and saying that, well, you shouldn't really do that. But this guy who is pushing the square wheel saying that I'm too busy. Sorry, I cannot listen to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's pretty much the same. People really are having hard time to get rid of their habits, even if they are really ridiculous. But yeah, like thankfully some, you know a few hundred merchants already listened to this and using our software, and so that it will become thousands in a couple of months or years.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm a big fan of your product. I mentioned it to a lot of our merchants. We've got mutual merchants as well, and I think there's different types of merchants. It's not necessarily that it's pigeonholed in a particular type of business, but if people want to learn more about pricing, so I think it's not necessarily too late to make the most of Cyber 5. So what should they do?
Speaker 2:Well, we, obviously they can visit our website and we have a free trial. So I openly invite people to abuse this free trial if they like during the holiday season so they can really come and just use the 14 day free trial and just leave and don't pay. I mean, I'm totally okay to openly invite people to do so. So because in minutes really they can come at their products and they can get the very first competitive Intel from the software. So they don't need to wait for weeks, months to actually deploy the mechanism. It's not an enterprise play, so it's really self-serve and automated way to actually generate those insights. So I believe if they actually convince themselves to use this during the 14 days during the holiday season, probably they will stick with it for the rest of the rest of the year and maybe in the coming year. So they can firstly do that If they like it. They can obviously also find me on LinkedIn, twitter. Probably you might also share them on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll link to those in the show.
Speaker 2:I'm quite active on LinkedIn, as we discussed in the beginning, so people can reach out to me either on LinkedIn or Twitter. Really, Cool.
Speaker 1:Now you know that at the end of the podcast, we like to ask our guests if they listen to a particular podcast or book, and I know that you are more of a fiction reader just to try and get some distraction from your very busy life.
Speaker 2:I know you do a lot of traveling like I do.
Speaker 1:So what are you reading at the moment?
Speaker 2:Well, interestingly, I start this actually re-reading period of my life, so I'm kind of trying to read books that I read during my university years, the books that kind of shaped my character, shaped my mentality, etc. And now I'm on Saul Bellows Dengligman, which is, I think, a Nobel Prize winner author who is a Nobel Prize winner, so it's only about like existentialism really, characters that are drifting away from the regular life, etc. I think I am in a very, very organized life, very disciplined, etc. So I really enjoy reading people that are quite the opposite of that. So that's one book that I can under the Dengligman Literally, the guy is Denglig throughout the book.
Speaker 1:Do you know what? I'm not a fiction reader, but I might have to give that one a try, yeah, give it a try, especially that whole existentialism.
Speaker 2:You know, books like Sartre, saul Bellows, all those guys from France, us, etc. Like I can tell you later, like nice, 5-10 books that could really put you into that mindset.
Speaker 1:Maybe we'll have to do an episode just for that.
Speaker 2:Oh, I said before.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that you're an extremely busy individual and you're very insightful, especially around pricing. I hope listeners found a lot of value in how they can really, I guess, stand out for the competition and compete effectively. We'll put all the links in the show notes. You should definitely follow Buldt. If you're on Twitter or X is it's now known or on LinkedIn for sure, try out the product. As Buldt said, there's no harm in a 14-day free trial, maybe some time just to set it up, but I think it's worth pursuing. And yeah, buldt, I look forward to speaking to you again soon.
Speaker 2:Yes, same year, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Take care, all the best Cheers.