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> Customers that need convincing typically don't stick around long.

Not saying you're wrong as I have no idea, but this seems counter-intuitive. A customer that puts more thought into buying the product seems more likely to stick around than one which buys on a whim. Can you give more detail about that?



In microeconomics, there's the concept of a "marginal consumer". When a demand curve is formed, it's so by mapping all the consumers' reserve prices (i.e. the maximum they're willing to pay for a product) on the y-axis and the quantities demanded on the x-axis (so the first guy is willing to pay $100 for 1 unit, the next one $98 for 1 unit, etc). The marginal consumer is the guy whose reserve price is exactly the the market price of whatever good we're talking about. So whenever the price of that good goes up, he stops buying it.

Now, if reserve prices correlate to the urgency and magnitude of consumer needs, the majority of consumers would be the guys who buy on a whim (if the demand curve is steep enough). They don't buy it because they want to, but rather because they need to.

tl;dr deong is right

P.S. If this still seems counterintuitive, consider that a customer asking too many questions doesn't necessarily signal he's interested in it. On the contraty, it could be that the more clueless he is, the more likely he is to ask questions as he didn't do any research in the first place. Example/anedoctal "evidence": Whenever I bought computer parts, for instance, it was mostly a silent trade, because I've picked them all beforehand. The only things I asked about were those I didn't bother to research.


Interesting, I hadn't thought of it that way before. Thanks for the explanation.


Presumably it's sort of a "if you need it badly enough to pay for it, you'd jump at a solution as soon as it showed itself" kind of thing.




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