Conditioner: the premium shelf pays for price increases, the budget shelf barely notices
I measured 2,966 price changes across 169 conditioners on amazon.de, each against the products that held their price. The category itself is symmetric: a 10 percent cut bought about 5 percent of rank, and a 10 percent increase cost about the same. The finding sits one level down. Premium conditioners were punished for increases at 0.81 — budget conditioners at 0.25 — and that gap survives the band check.
In short
- A 10 percent cut improved rank by about 5 percent (range 4 to 7). Measured across 2,966 price changes from 169 products, each against category controls.
- A 10 percent increase cost about 5 percent of rank (range 4 to 7). The two directions are statistically indistinguishable — this is a symmetric category.
- Premium pays for increases, budget doesn't. Increases hit the €20–43 shelf at 0.81 and the €4–14 shelf at 0.25. The 90 percent ranges don't touch — the gap is demonstrable, the first segment finding in this series to survive the band check.
- Every depth bracket moved rank. All six brackets, cuts and increases alike, stay clear of the no-change line. On the cut side, only going past 25 percent off demonstrably bought more than a medium cut.
- Competitors mostly leave cuts alone but answer increases faster. Repricing after a cut ran 4 percent above baseline with a two-day median lag; after an increase, 15 percent above with a one-day lag.
Price cuts
A 10% cut improved rank by roughly 4 to 7 percent.
Price increases
A 10% increase worsened rank by roughly 4 to 7 percent.
RAISE A €25 CONDITIONER AND THE RANKING NOTICES. RAISE A €10 ONE AND IT SHRUGS.
At category level, conditioner is a textbook symmetric market. Cuts land at 0.54, increases at 0.50, and the two ranges overlap almost completely — the market rewards a discount and punishes an increase in the same measure. Eight categories into this series, that makes conditioner the cleanest symmetric case so far.
The interesting economics are inside the segments. On the increase side there is a slope: budget at 0.25, mid at 0.41, premium at 0.81. Only the ends of that slope are demonstrable — Premium against Budget is the one pair whose 90 percent ranges stay apart — but it is the first segment gap in this series to survive the band check at all. Taking the point values at face value, a premium conditioner that raises its price loses visibility at more than three times the budget rate.
On the cut side, no such order exists. Budget, mid and premium all overlap, as they did in the categories before this one. Whatever makes the premium shelf sensitive, it only shows when prices go up.
The full picture
01 · 1 · DOES DISCOUNT DEPTH MATTER?
At the ends, yes — but a medium cut bought nothing more than a mild one.
MILD AND MEDIUM CUTS BUY THE SAME. ONLY DEEP CUTS BUY MORE.
The cut side has a flat middle. Cuts of 5 to 15 percent and cuts of 15 to 25 percent both bought about 11 percent of rank — their ranges sit almost on top of each other. The second ten points of discount bought nothing the first ten hadn't already delivered. Only past 25 percent off does the picture change: about 23 percent better rank, and that bracket separates demonstrably from the medium one. If this category has a discount sweet spot, it is either shallow or very deep — the middle is wasted margin.
The increase side reads like a staircase — 5, 13, 27 percent worse — but only the ends separate; adjacent brackets overlap. What is demonstrable is simpler and worth having: every increase bracket sits clearly in the damage zone. There is no free increase in this category, not even a small one.
02 · 2 · WILL COMPETITORS FOLLOW?
Cuts are mostly left alone. Increases get answered — and a day faster.
HALF THE ANSWERS LAND ON DAY ONE. MOST NEVER COME.
Across 2,373 price cuts, competitor repricing ran at 1.04 times each rival's own baseline rate — 4 percent above chance, the kind of lift that says a discount here is largely ignored. Increases drew 1.15 times baseline. The market polices upward moves more than downward ones.
Timing tells the same story. The median first answer to a cut took two days; to an increase, one day. 55 percent of cuts saw a same-day price move somewhere in the category — those are excluded as ambiguous, so both lift figures are conservative lower bounds.
03 · 3 · WHERE WOULD A NEW PRODUCT ENTER?
Between €8.26 and €12.47, where all nine judged recent entrants are winning.
THE SCORING'S TOP BAND HOLDS ONE PRODUCT. THE EVIDENCE LIVES NEXT DOOR.
No corridor: no price band in this category met the entry criteria, so none is marked recommended.
First, a correction of my own tool. The corridor scoring puts €4.45–€5.47 on top — a band that contains exactly one product. One product with 200 reviews sitting in the top third is not a corridor, it is an anecdote, and I don't recommend an entry on a sample of one. I set that band aside.
The evidence lives between €8.26 and €12.47. Those two bands hold 36 products, and all nine recent entrants judged there — six in the lower band, three in the upper — are winning. The upper band also beats the top-third baseline at 44 percent. Median reviews run 104 to 142, so incumbents are established but not walled off, and prices in the corridor hold for roughly seven weeks at a time.
04 · 4 · WHAT DOES THE MARKET LOOK LIKE UNDERNEATH?
A busy, promotion-heavy shelf where roughly one entrant in four wins.
The measured set spans €3.62 to €42.98, and the fit set splits into three tiers of almost equal size: 57 budget, 54 mid, 58 premium products. The heaviest shelves sit at €18.84–€23.15 with 33 products and €12.47–€15.33 with 28 — the mid-premium crossover is where this category crowds.
99 products entered within the last 24 months. 23 are winning and 7 have already exited — roughly one entrant in four wins, among the friendliest rates in this series, against about one in eight in shampoo.
The category is promotion-heavy: 31 percent of all detected price changes were disturbed by overlapping moves, stockouts, review bursts or data gaps and had to be excluded. That is the distance between the 4,680 changes found and the 2,966 the figures rest on — the funnel below accounts for every step.
Data appendix
The set started from a fresh Amazon category export of 1,849 products in the Spülungen & Conditioner path on amazon.de, curated on 19 August 2026 under the frozen rules of this series. In order: 389 foreign types removed — the largest block being leave-in and spray conditioners, which are a different format, plus masks, 2-in-1s, solid bars, oils, styling products and a handful of misfiled fragrances; 380 products outside the 200–500 ml single-unit band, with 184 titles that carry no parsable size held on a doubt list rather than guessed at; 43 multipacks and sets; 4 children's lines; 58 outside the €3–45 price frame; 160 below 20 reviews; and 249 above the cap of three products per brand, keeping the review-strongest. That leaves 382 products from 218 brands. Category membership comes from Amazon's own tree, not from title keywords — a "2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner" would pass any keyword filter, but the tree records where Amazon actually shelves it. 325 of the 382 synced products sit in the majority path; 44 sit elsewhere in the tree and their 14 measured events were excluded from the figures. Thirteen products return no category path at all; the current guard treats them as conformant — a known limitation I plan to close. The product list and the curation record are available on request for methodological review.
| Step | Events | Removed because |
|---|---|---|
| Price changes detected | 4,680 | — |
| Gaps in the price history | −118 | the price series around the change is incomplete |
| Too little ranking data | −358 | not enough rank observations to measure an effect |
| Overlapping price change | −767 | another move by the same product inside the window |
| Deal or coupon markers | −0 | the change was a flagged promotion, not a price |
| Stockout signals | −174 | availability broke during the window |
| Burst of new reviews | −216 | a review spike could move rank on its own |
| Listing too young | −113 | less than 60 days of history |
| Too few control products | −102 | fewer than 5 quiet products to compare against |
| Passed every check | 3,225 | one event can fail several checks at once |
| Used for the figures | 2,966 | after removing 247 events with a pre-existing rank trend and 14 events from products outside the category tree; an event can carry both flags |
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
Observed price changes ran from −82.5 percent to +558 percent. The extremes are mostly listings returning to a nominal price after being unavailable, not commercial decisions. The figures above are read from the dense middle of that range; nothing here says what a 200 percent increase would do.
Limits
- LIMITS — I measure the ranking, not units sold, and only over a 14-day window after each change. The figures are category-level averages across 2,966 events from 169 products; they are a planning input, not a promise for any single product. They hold only inside the price moves actually observed here. The segment gradient is demonstrable only between Premium and Budget — Mid overlaps both ends. Competitor reaction and advertising interplay are not modelled, and a rank position says nothing about the margin a price move costs or saves.
- 382 products
- 4,680 price changes found
- 3,225 passed every check
- 2,966 used for the figures
- 169 products in the fit set
- ref 22317149
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.