Amazon.com is known for having low prices. However, a study conducted by a startup called Boomerang Commerce reveals that Amazon's pricing strategy is much more nuanced than simply undercutting the competition. Boomerang, founded by Amazon veteran Guru Hariharan, makes software that tracks prices on shopping sites that compete with its clients, then recommends price changes dynamically. Those changes are based on rules its clients set about which products to match prices on and which to boost higher or drop lower than a competitor's to boost profits or sales, respectively.
Guru Hariharan
Melissa Campanelli is Editor-in-Chief of Total Retail. She is an industry veteran, having covered all aspects of retail, tech, digital, e-commerce, and marketing over the past 20 years. Melissa is also the co-founder of the Women in Retail Leadership Circle.
Symphony Commerce, a commerce-as-a-service platform provider that works with enterprise-level retailers, won the Shop.org Digital Commerce Startup of the Year competition during the National Retail Federation's Annual Convention and EXPO yesterday.
Guru Hariharan spent half-a-decade at Amazon.com, but says he had little face-to-face contact with the man he considers his idol, CEO Jeff Bezos. A former junior engineer who rose up the company ranks before departing in 2009, Hariharan only ever talked to Bezos once in his five-and-a-half year Amazon career, answering questions for him and his senior executives during a three-hour annual review. "If you think about labor as the most painful thing in life, that surpassed it probably," says Hariharan, who remembers spending several weeks preparing a six-page document on the successes of Amazon Webstore.
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