Pricing models, elasticity, and margin optimisation
One invented hamper shop in Leeds, £1.8 million a year, walked through twelve months of my commission model: the baseline agreed before the start, the base rate or the commission each month (whichever is higher, never both), exactly what the commission is calculated on, a slow case and a bad case, what happens when you want out, and what the same year would cost on a package.
A worked five year cost model for a shop paying more every year for a platform it does not own: Shopify and Magento with apps, agency, transaction fees and forced upgrades, against a Solidus build, hosting and maintenance, discounted to today. Then the migration itself: what moves and what cannot, passwords, saved cards, customer data law, the redirect map and the cutover.
How to build a nightly loop in a Solidus shop that reads competitors' public prices, stock, costs and elasticity, sets each product's price inside limits, moves ad budget towards profit, and stays inside UK consumer and competition law. Formulas, worked examples and Rails code.
Anchoring, decoys, charm prices, tiers, reference prices, partitioned prices and loss aversion: what each original study found, how well it has held up, how to test it on your own shop, and which tactics UK law now bans.
How dynamic pricing actually works for a shop: estimating elasticity from your own orders, the markup rule, a demand model, the guardrails, and the UK price transparency and competition rules, with Solidus and Rails code.
A year of hamper sales, one log log regression and an elasticity of minus 1.6: how to model demand with OLS, read the output and find the price that pays.
How to split an ad budget and set a price when you cannot know how the month will go: scenarios, diminishing returns, the shadow price of budget, the flaw of averages and the markup rule, worked step by step for an invented candle shop in Bristol.
PayPal, buying on invoice and direct debit carry most German online turnover, and German price law shapes every product page. What a UK shop offers at the checkout, and how it shows the price, worked through for a Brighton shop.
Your price is only half of the decision, because your rival is choosing too. Payoff matrices, dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium, repeated games, credible threats and reaction functions, worked through for two invented Bristol coffee roasters.
When a bigger rival cuts the price of a product you both sell, matching feels safe and usually loses money. The economics of price wars, elasticity, contribution, suppliers, switching costs and bundles, worked through for an invented Leeds tyre retailer.
