Market Pricing Survey For Independent Printers

One thing all small printers want to improve is the way we price our service. There is a cost component that each print shop has intimate knowledge of. There is also another component that exists outside our control, but one that we cannot ignore. And that is what all other printers do in the market and the motivation for our survey.

It should be noted that comparison should be made in the context of all else being equal; if excellence in quality and service is a component of your cost, then it should be added on top of the commodity price.

That said, suppose you use the cost plus method to come up with the price. You could adjust up and down a little based on known prices by a few competitors in the same class of service. But this is hardly confidence inspiring. You want to know a wider price range from a larger number of competitors and with confidence.

Why? We all know the reasons:

• If your cost based price is low compared to the market, you are lean, mean, smart and efficient and you should raise your profit. You earned it.

• If your cost based price is high compared to the market, you have to be concerned. You could lose potential sales as well as existing customers. If one of your customers is seduced with low price by a competitor, your account could be in jeopardy. Keep in mind, loyalty can afford you a reasonable but only reasonable premium. Moreover, it points to a more important question on the efficiency of your operations - from purchasing, to capital equipment, to worker training, to business process.

• You can approach potential customers with new authority on market pricing. Better yet, you can show off your exceptional value, independently validated by a third party - as we will now show you!

These are important reasons. You should know, and know with confidence.

In an effort to provide value to our small printers community, we built an application called the iMyck Price Checker as a tool to address this pricing issue. First, we run an automated web scraper program to collect prices available on the Internet. These are prices Southern California print shops publish on their websites. At this point, we have surveyed several dozens of semi-randomly selected companies and collected about fifty thousand data points. Second, we performs analysis against this survey data to give you an estimated percentile of any price you enter into the system. The we provide friendly graphical user interface to let you see where your price stands compared to the surveyed market.

The iMyck Price Checker

The local printing market is very fragmented hence prices are widely different from shop to shop. However, with increasing transparency brought about by the Internet, we expect the prices will converge in the future. Printers will find it more difficult to justify prices that are far off from the norm.

Use the iMyck Price Checker to gain a better awareness about what other printers set their retail prices. There are a few things to keep in mind. One is that the app does not have any information on quality or service. Another is that data points at very low or very high quantities do not represent the market well because large sampling error makes them statistically less meaningful.

To help make this tool more useful in the future, please send us comments and feedback. If there is any website you wish to have prices included in the analysis, please contact us and specify on the subject line : To be included in the price survey.

Happy Printing!