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When Should You Nickel-and-Dime Your Customers?

October 1, 2010 | Rebecca W. Hamilton, Joydeep Srivastava, Ajay Thomas Abraham | Marketing
If you've spent time at an airport recently, you're likely to have overheard a conversation between a surprised non-frequent flyer and a ticket agent about fees for checked luggage. That exchange may have been a loud one if the airline was charging $25 (or more) per bag. Although charging separately for luggage allows airlines to advertise lower ticket prices, potentially increasing sales, incorporating baggage fees into the ticket price might increase the satisfaction of customers as well as raise the retention rate of check-in counter agents. And therein lies the rub. When should a company "nickel-and-dime" customers by charging separately for various extras, and when is it better to keep things simple by combining all of the charges into one total price? Consider another example: The price of wall-to-wall carpeting may or may not include the cost of installation or delivery to the customer's home. Given that most customers neither own a vehicle large enough to transport a living-room"Òsized piece of carpeting nor have any desire to rent one, delivery is, for all intents and purposes, a required component of the purchase. If nearly all customers will be buying both carpeting and delivery, should the price of the carpeting include delivery or should the company charge for it separately? Recent research suggests that price partitioning, the manner in which a total price is divided into components, affects customers' price perceptions, their willingness to purchase and even their likelihood of repurchasing from the same vendor. Whether partitioning or combining is more effective depends on a variety of factors, such as whether customers comparison shop, whether they are more sensitive to the prices of some components (delivery) than to others (carpeting), whether the price of one component is small or large relative to the others, whether the company controls the costs and quality of a particular component, and which components are most central to the customer's goals.
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