I've often thought that it would be interesting to offer customers an option to commit to their own price, where they may be called on (say) a month in the future to pay that price or less, with the understanding that every person that purchases the product that month will pay the same price, ultimately chosen by me (presumably to optimize my profits). And then repeat each month, setting each month's settling price plus some premium (a couple percent or so, to make sure the price does not go to zero too quickly) as the "immediate purchase" price for the next month.
You, the customer, obviously wouldn't name a price higher than you were willing to pay (the product is not worth that much to you), but you also wouldn't have an incentive to undercut too badly - if you do so, I'll simply pick a higher cutoff than your price, and you won't get the product. There's really no gaming this system, if I'm not happy to sell at a price, I don't sell to you; if you bid fairly high, though, you'll never get screwed by me, all purchasers will be "filled" at the same price every month.
Chargebacks are the main problem with this - you'd have to make sure that you could retroactively adjust prices in order to avoid possible gaming of the system via fraudulent charges, and I have no idea how that would square with the CC companies.
Bonus points for somehow arranging things so that you can profit off of the interest on the committed-but-not-yet-spent money that people commit to spend on your product...
You, the customer, obviously wouldn't name a price higher than you were willing to pay (the product is not worth that much to you), but you also wouldn't have an incentive to undercut too badly - if you do so, I'll simply pick a higher cutoff than your price, and you won't get the product. There's really no gaming this system, if I'm not happy to sell at a price, I don't sell to you; if you bid fairly high, though, you'll never get screwed by me, all purchasers will be "filled" at the same price every month.
Chargebacks are the main problem with this - you'd have to make sure that you could retroactively adjust prices in order to avoid possible gaming of the system via fraudulent charges, and I have no idea how that would square with the CC companies.
Bonus points for somehow arranging things so that you can profit off of the interest on the committed-but-not-yet-spent money that people commit to spend on your product...