Bluetooth in-ear headphones: below €25 a discount barely moves the rank
I measured 2,451 price changes across 257 Bluetooth in-ear headphones and compared each one against the products that held their price. A 10 percent cut improved the sales rank by about 10 percent within two weeks, and a 10 percent increase cost about 9 percent. Below €25 a cut did very little. This is report 2 of twelve in this quarter's consumer electronics series.
In short
- Price moves the rank about one for one. A 10 percent cut improved the rank by about 10 percent (range 8 to 12) within two weeks.
- Increases hurt about as much. A 10 percent increase cost about 9 percent of rank (range 7 to 11). I cannot separate the two directions.
- Below €25, a cut barely works. Budget headphones gained about 4 percent of rank per 10 percent cut (range less than 1 to 7). From €25 to €40 it was about 10 percent, above €40 about 15 percent.
- Cheap headphones also lose less when they raise prices. A 10 percent increase cost about 5 percent of rank below €25 (range 3 to 7), and about 10 percent above €40.
- Competitors do not react. After a cut, other sellers changed their prices no more often than they do anyway.
Price cuts
A 10% cut improved rank by roughly 8 to 12 percent.
Price increases
A 10% increase cost roughly 7 to 11 percent of rank.
THE CHEAPER THE HEADPHONES, THE LESS A CUT DOES
In the budget third, below €25, a cut moved the rank only a little. Its range runs from 0.03 to 0.66 and stays below the ranges of both pricier groups, so this difference holds up in the data.
Mid and premium overlap, so the step from 10 to 15 percent is an observation only. Above €40 a cut moved the rank about one and a half times as far as the price.
Increases show the same order. Budget headphones lost clearly less rank after a rise than premium ones. The mid group sits between them and overlaps both.
The full picture
01 · 1 · Does discount depth matter?
A little. Bigger moves worked more, but the steps blur into each other.
BIGGER CUTS HELP, THE BIGGEST RISES HURT MOST
A cut of 5 to 15 percent improved the rank by 17 percent, 15 to 25 percent by 23 percent and more than 25 percent by 33 percent. The ranges of neighbouring steps overlap, so I cannot show that each extra step adds more.
On the other side, a rise of more than 25 percent cost 45 percent of rank, clearly more than a rise of 15 to 25 percent at 19 percent. Every step on both sides stays away from the no-change line.
02 · 2 · Will competitors follow?
No more than on any other day.
A CUT CHANGES NOTHING IN HOW OFTEN OTHERS MOVE
I looked at 2,603 cuts on 312 products. Within 14 days, some competitor changed a price after 99 percent of them. Prices in this category move all the time, and after a cut they moved about 4 percent less often than in a normal two-week window.
Increases show the same, about 2 percent fewer moves than usual. 70 percent of first moves fell on the same day as the trigger, which I cannot read as a reaction.
03 · 3 · Where can a new product get in?
Nowhere I can show on solid evidence.
A PROMISING BAND AT THE TOP, ON TOO FEW NEWCOMERS
No corridor: no price band in this category met the entry criteria, so none is marked recommended.
In the last 24 months, 167 new products entered this shelf. 17 of them now rank in the top third, and 17 have left again.
The strongest band in my scoring is €105 to €134. Two of the three newcomers I could judge there reached the top third. Three newcomers are too few to recommend a band. In the busy bands from €19 to €31, six of 21 judged newcomers made it.
04 · 4 · What does the shelf look like?
A crowded cheap end and a top end held by products with thousands of reviews.
Of the 413 products I could place on the price map, 169 sit in the three cheapest bands, up to €31.17. 34 sit in the four most expensive bands, from €105.
The typical product in a band has between 218 and 7,416 reviews. A typical price held for 50 to 365 days, depending on the band.
Data appendix
I started from a list of 2,235 listings on amazon.de. I removed 524 listings that were not Bluetooth in-ear headphones, such as over-ear and open-ear models, sleep and swim headphones, gaming headsets and replacement parts. I also removed 2 lines for children, 244 listings outside €15 to €300 and 297 listings with fewer than 20 reviews. To keep single brands from dominating, I kept at most three products per brand, which removed 679. Of the remaining 489 listings, 273 were variation groups that cannot be bought themselves. I replaced each with one sellable variant, the one with the longest price history, and checked the variants against the same rules. That gave 438 products. After the price history came in, I removed 3 whose typical price fell outside €15 to €300, which left 435. Of these, 89 never showed a price on amazon.de, so they add nothing to the figures.
I compare each product only against products in the same Amazon categories. Amazon files this product type in two parallel branches, "In-Ear-Ohrhörer" and "Bluetooth-Kopfhörer", and I accept both. That is stricter than title keywords, because a pair of over-ear headphones often lists "in-ear" among its keywords. 22 products sat outside these categories, and their 112 price changes were left out. The product list is available on request for methodological review.
| Step | Events | Removed because |
|---|---|---|
| Price changes found | 5,348 | — |
| Gaps in the price history | −190 | the price history had holes around the change |
| Too little ranking data | −311 | the rank was missing on too many days |
| Overlapping price change | −1,121 | another price change fell inside the measuring window |
| Deal or coupon markers | 0 | a deal or coupon ran at the same time |
| Stockout signals | −334 | the product looked out of stock |
| Burst of new reviews | −1,049 | reviews jumped at the same time |
| Listing too young | −294 | the listing was less than 60 days old |
| Too few control products | −151 | fewer than 5 comparable products held their price |
| Passed every check | 2,878 | one event can fail several checks |
| Used for the figures | 2,451 | minus 326 with a trend already running before the change and 112 from products outside the category, 11 of them counted in both |
price change ≥ 5% and ≥ €0.30, held ≥ 7 days · comparison: 14 days before, days 3–14 after · control products: same category, price moved less than 2%, at least 5 of them · rank coverage ≥ 70% of days · listing older than 60 days · review burst = more than 10% and at least 15 new reviews · ranges are 90%, from a bootstrap clustered by product · study protocol v1.1
The price changes I found range from −75 percent to +420 percent. The extreme values are listings returning from a nominal placeholder price after being unavailable. They do not drive the figures, which come from the dense middle. 70 percent of the used changes were cuts or increases of up to 25 percent.
Limits
- LIMITS — I measure the ranking, not units sold, and only over two weeks after a change. Every figure holds only for the price moves sellers actually made in this category. The price groups are thirds of this set, so "premium" means €39.99 to €276.83 here. Competitor reactions are counted as any price change by another product in the category, which says nothing about intent. The entry view looks back 24 months and judges newcomers only once they have been listed long enough.
- 435 products
- 5,348 price changes found
- 2,878 passed every check
- 2,451 used for the figures
- 257 products in the fit set
- ref e01f1ff3
The Monthly
Each weekly report measures a single category. The Monthly is where they get compared, and it carries the quarterly report when one is published.