How to price? How to price?Part of our service is to promote our customers on the Internet.
Appropriate postings, registering URLs with search engines and indexes
etc. How should we charge for this?
We could charge for the time spent. That's fine for the regular listing
of URLs and posting to newsgroups that take general advertising.
Part of the activity though is to search the net for appropriate
groups, information sources etc. Depending upon the nature of the
product this may result in a lot of suitable sources found for little
effort, or it could mean that we spend a lot of time to little effect.
If we charge for the time spent our customers might end up paying for
an effort that yields them no value. We could of course make it clear
to them that this might happen, and we could perhaps guess on the
liklihood of finding good quality information for them on the basis of
our knowledge and experience - but we might be wrong.
If we charge on the basis of some sort of 'success ratio' (groups
identified, emails sent - which would be difficult to define in
itself), we might end up spending a lot of time searching without
success, and earning nothing for our efforts.
A possible halfway house is that we could offer (say) two hours of
work for a set price, which would identify the main hits, and then
charge per additional time period.
What do others do? What should we do?
Nick Gassman - known as nick@netwiz.demon.co.uk
Interactive Multimedia across The Internet is here... - ask me
Or look at http://www.route-one.co.uk/route-one/