Pricing agency
A price agency is a service provider for private individuals, companies, authorities and associations. The client comes to the pricing agency with an offer for a specific product / service. This then looks for a cheaper provider for that product. The price agency's fee is derived from the price difference, i.e. the customer's savings (usually 10 to 30%).
The first companies started using price research as a business model in the early 1990s. However, the enormous spread of the Internet meant that the price agency system had to adapt to the rapid pace of information dissemination. Today, the Internet offers every user the opportunity to quickly and efficiently research providers and prices (for example of high-quality technical devices) themselves (see Internet price comparison ). Market transparency has increased enormously thanks to new information media, especially the Internet. The service provided by price agencies consists in particular of making the market more transparent for their customers and thus giving them price advantages.
Another social change had a direct impact on the business areas of the price agencies. The abolition of the discount law on July 25, 2001 also created the possibility for private consumers to deal directly with the seller when purchasing and, if necessary, to negotiate a discount that was previously capped at 3% of the value of the goods when paying in cash.
Price agencies that can assert themselves on the market today therefore rely more on brokerage and purchasing cooperations than on research. So you no longer earn your money through proportional commissions of the saved costs of the buyer, but rather by referring customers to the providers. Some price agencies specialize in a certain industry or niche, such as researching inexpensive new cars, the regional heating oil market or products in the telecommunications sector, thus avoiding the high competitive pressure of Internet search engines.
Web links
literature
- Sabine Ottinger: Price agencies in the tension between competition and neutrality . Hartung-Gorre publishing house, Konstanz 2004, ISBN 3-89649-933-5 (plus dissertation, University of Konstanz 2003).