Webcams: a cut works hard, a price rise costs little
I measured 1,525 price changes across 160 webcams and compared each one against the products that held their price. A 10 percent cut improved the sales rank by about 15 percent within two weeks, while a 10 percent increase cost only about 3 percent. The two directions are clearly apart. This is report 6 of twelve in this quarter's consumer electronics series.
In short
- A cut moves the rank more than one for one. A 10 percent cut improved the rank by about 15 percent (range 11 to 17) within two weeks.
- A price rise costs little. A 10 percent increase cost about 3 percent of rank (range less than 1 to 7). The two ranges do not overlap.
- Small rises showed no clear cost. Increases of 5 to 15 percent could not be told apart from no change. Rises of 15 percent or more cost about 20 to 25 percent of rank.
- Cuts beyond 25 percent bought clearly more. They improved the rank by 45 percent, against 22 percent for cuts of 15 to 25 percent.
- Competitors barely react. After a cut, other sellers changed their prices only about 3 percent more often than usual.
Price cuts
A 10% cut improved rank by roughly 11 to 17 percent.
Price increases
A 10% increase cost roughly less than 1 to 7 percent of rank.
A cut buys far more than a rise costs
A cut moved the rank about one and a half times as far as the price. Its range starts at 1.13. An increase moved the rank about a third as far as the price, with a range that ends at 0.71. The two ranges are clearly apart, so this difference holds up in the data.
By price group, premium webcams above €55 gained about 18 percent per 10 percent cut, budget ones about 15 and mid ones about 10. The ranges overlap, so I cannot rank the groups.
For increases between €34 and €55 the range includes zero. There I cannot say whether a rise cost anything.
The full picture
01 · Does discount depth matter?
For cuts, yes. For rises, only beyond 15 percent.
A cut of 5 to 15 percent improved the rank by 14 percent and 15 to 25 percent by 22 percent. These two overlap. Beyond 25 percent the rank improved by 45 percent, clearly more.
A rise of 5 to 15 percent showed no clear change. Rises of 15 to 25 percent and more than 25 percent cost 25 and 20 percent of rank, and those two overlap.
02 · Will competitors follow?
Hardly more than they move on any other day.
Prices move all the time, a cut adds little
I looked at 1,689 cuts on 184 products. Within 14 days, some competitor changed a price after 96 percent of them. Against a normal two-week window, competitors moved only about 3 percent more often after a cut.
After an increase it was about 8 percent more. 57 percent of first moves fell on the same day as the trigger, which I cannot read as a reaction.
03 · Where can a new product get in?
Nowhere I can show on solid evidence.
Newcomers win here and there, never often
No corridor: no price band in this category met the entry criteria, so none is marked recommended.
In the last 24 months, 78 new products entered this category. 15 of them now rank in the top third, and 6 have left again.
The scoring in my tool points to €107 to €129. I overrule it, because no newcomer there could be judged yet. Elsewhere, newcomers reached the top third in several bands, but never more than three in any one band.
04 · What does the market look like?
Just over half the shelf costs less than €52, the top end is thin.
Of the 227 products I could place on the price map, 67 sit in the three cheapest bands, up to €35.83. 34 sit in the four most expensive bands, from €89.34.
The typical product in a band has between 35 and 1,354 reviews. A typical price held for 37 to 130 days, depending on the band.
Data appendix
I started from a list of 1,577 listings on amazon.de. I removed 717 listings that were not webcams, such as conference systems, document cameras, camera modules, outdoor cameras and accessories. I also removed 8 multipacks and sets, 274 listings outside €20 to €200 and 164 listings with fewer than 20 reviews. To keep single brands from dominating, I kept at most three products per brand, which removed 149. Of the remaining 265 listings, 77 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 242 products. After the price history came in, I removed 9 whose typical price fell outside €20 to €200, which left 233. Of these, 31 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 category, here "Webcams". That is stricter than title keywords, because a conference bar or a camera module often calls itself a webcam in its title. 6 products sat outside this category, and their 82 price changes were left out. The product list is available on request for methodological review.
| Step | Events | Removed because |
|---|---|---|
| Price changes found | 3,542 | n/a |
| Gaps in the price history | −115 | the price history had holes around the change |
| Too little ranking data | −539 | the rank was missing on too many days |
| Overlapping price change | −724 | another price change fell inside the measuring window |
| Deal or coupon markers | 0 | a deal or coupon ran at the same time |
| Stockout signals | −195 | the product looked out of stock |
| Burst of new reviews | −364 | reviews jumped at the same time |
| Listing too young | −147 | the listing was less than 60 days old |
| Too few control products | −265 | fewer than 5 comparable products held their price |
| Passed every check | 1,877 | one event can fail several checks |
| Used for the figures | 1,525 | minus 285 with a trend already running before the change and 82 from products outside the category, 15 of them counted in both |
price change ≥ 5% and ≥ €0.30, held ≥ 7 days · comparison: 14 days before, days 3 to 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 −60 percent to +1,001 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. 78 percent of the used changes were cuts or increases of up to 25 percent.
Limits
- LIMITS. I measure the sales rank on Amazon. I cannot see units sold, and I look only at the 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 €55.29 to €185.56 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.
- 233 products
- 3,542 price changes found
- 1,877 passed every check
- 1,525 used for the figures
- 160 products in the fit set
- ref b57bdd04
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