In the January edition of NACS Publications The College Store Magazine, there was an interesting article on dynamic pricing, The Root of the Problem by Dan Angelo. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, we highly recommend checking it out. We wanted to talk a bit about how BookVolume can help you get the most out of dynamic pricing.

The more online buying you do, the more obsolete traditional pricing strategies become. Scott Franz, the director of the Zag Shop at Gonzaga University, summed up the situation nicely, “If we’re going to use price-comparison tools, we should first make sure our prices are competitive. Our pricing model is really broken and we should really fix that first.” Static prices set by publishers and wholesale guides aren’t changing based on daily fluctuating supply and demand, like the prices found online.

A number of BookVolume users have told us they also use Verba Software and the two systems complement each other amazingly. Verba calculates textbook shelf prices for bookstores so that they can focus their time and energy on buying more books online, saving money and focusing on capturing student business.

When you’re using BookVolume to buy 20% of you’re books online for 80% off the list price, the ability to dynamically price your books becomes an invaluable option. With dynamic pricing, your ability to buy more books online will increase because you will be making your profits on the average cost of the total number of copies you bought per title, rather than pricing based on what you paid for an individual book. You will be able to raise the maximum price you are willing to pay for any given book, based on how much you saved on other books.

In short, if you dynamically price your books, you’ll make more money, have better priced books in your store, compete with online retailers like Amazon and capture more business. BookVolume is here to help.