Reduce Price to Improve Revenues and Margins
CHOICE 1 OBJECTIVE: REWARD CUSTOMERS
CHOICE 2 SEGMENTS: CUSTOMER COST SAVING SEGMENT / CUSTOMERS WHO ORDER THROUGH LESS-EXPENSIVE CHANNELS
CHOICE 3 COMPONENT:CHANGE THE BENEFIT PACKAGE
| No. | SIC | Year | Notes |
| 1 | 5912 | 2002 | Sales for online pharmacies are surging as the prices of prescription drugs go up and as customers continue to look for bargains. The top choice for online pharmacy was Drugstore.com. It offered prescription drugs at the cheapest price (with a $10 discount for first-time customers), gave price quotes for both generic and brand-name drugs, had the fastest online delivery, and had detailed directions on how to use the drugs. The worst features were that the site's search function was not user friendly and, at one time, the site offered a product that was discontinued by the manufacturer. |
| 2 | 6211 | 2002 | Investment firms are shifting their approach to smaller accounts in an effort to cut costs. Many investors have been switched to call centers instead of an individual broker. Prudential shifts accounts of less than $25,000 to call centers. In some cases, this shift may improve customer service and expertise and drive down fees as they were largely ignored by individual brokers. |
| 3 | 6211 | 2005 | Ameritrade recently cut pricing for option trades to $.75 a contract from $1.50 and has introduced a bare-bones program called IZONE that offers $5 trades to customers who place orders on line or by touch-tone phone. |
| 4 | 6211 | 2005 | Escalating the price war at discount brokers, Ameritrade Holding Corp. is testing a program called Izone that offers trades at about half its regular commission. The barebones program is available online or by touch-tone phone only, and doesn't include live price quotes, news, research, or other tools that Ameritrade offers to customers who pay its conventional $10.99 for stock trades. Izone users must pay an extra $9.99 a month, after a three-month free offer, for those features, and more for analytical tools and news reports. if they call for broker assisted orders, they must pay at least $24.99 a trade. In an effort to ensure that users are self-sufficient investors, Ameritrade requires Izone users have two years' experience as a discount-broker client and at least two years' experience as an Internet user. |
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