NEW DISCOUNTS EXPLAINED

ClassicSelect World has been around in some form or another (ClassicSelect, then ClassicSelect World) since 2013. In that entire time, we've always offered our customers 25% off any order that exceeded $40. 

Recently we've taken to adding new releases and catalog titles from the major and independent labels for classical and jazz. Adding those titles was an attempt to be a more full service store for our growing store. However, we had a very hard time devising a system where we could offer our automatic 25% discount to our customers. 

Now, it seems like a simple solution. As with every item in the store now, we simply know what we want to make on a sale, and then mark the price up 25% above the for our customers who buy items from us utilizing the automatic discount (which is 93% of you). 

However, when we did that using the wholesale prices provided to us by our new distributor for over 100,000 classical titles, we found that we couldn't avoid giving our customers sticker shock. 

Based on the analytics that are built into e-commerce sites these days, we have a very good idea about our customers' buying behaviors. Now, we can't track you once you leave our site, but we can track your behavior on our site, and what prices and price points create the magic "sweet spot" we're looking for so you can get a great bargain and we can pay the rent, and go on vacation once a year...essentially, a win/win, we hope. 

But using the wholesale prices from our distributor (Alliance Entertainment Corporation, essentially about the only guys left on the block these days), we found that no matter how much we tout it, many customers seem to forget or don't realize that a price or a cart over $40 gets an automatic discount. We tried looking for a good piece of software that showed you your price after discount, and we tried adding that to the page (we have too many new titles to create a graphic for each title). Essentially anything we used that showed the sale price after $40 created confusion, so we had to stop using it. And showing the price BEFORE this discount created sticker shock - remember you save $25 on a $100 boxed set. 

We also know from our research that we need to be in the general pricing ballpark for items to sell - that is, we need to know what our competition is selling items for, and we need to be close to that. And not having the sale price on the product page made it look like we were charging, tens, and in some cases, hundreds of dollars more than Amazon, Arkiv, etc for a title that we actually were selling for less than they were, once you put the item in the cart and saw the discount. 

SO...we're trying this. Right now, we're running the promotion on Warner Classics and Erato. If the software works and the promotion works, we'll start to roll it out to other labels very quickly. The Universal classical labels Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, and the Sony Classical labels would be logical targets, as well as the larger indies like Hyperion, Naxos, Chandos, Nimbus and their brethren.