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Bol.com is one of the biggest online retailers in Europe that offers general merchandising products in categories such as film, music, electronics, jewelry, toys, watches, baby products, gardening and DIY to customers in The Netherlands and Belgium.

In the past years Bol.com became an organization in which data an extremely big part of their business that adds a lot of value. Data does not only add value to Bol.com, but Bol.com considers themselves a data driven company. Tableau, an American company in interactive data visualization software that is focused on business intelligence made this possible (Hoe bol.com een datagestuurde organisatie wordt dankzij selfservice analytics van, n.d.). By using Tableau employees of Bol.com are able to facilitate their own data related needs.

A big part of the success of modern online retailers is agility (Hoe bol.com een datagestuurde organisatie wordt dankzij selfservice analytics van, n.d.). Being able to react quickly to changing consumer behavior has always been crucial to retail companies, but for online retailers this is extremely important. You might want to think of your own experiences on online sites, if you are not able to find what you are looking for you will quickly move to another website.

Why Tableau is crucial to the success of Bol.com is simple. The bigger a company becomes, the more difficult it becomes to achieve agility. Tableau offers quick, accurate data insights for consumer behavior and purchasing trends. With these data insights Bol.com is able to adapt their product portfolio quickly, such that customers can easily find what they are looking for. 

Tableau also helps Bol.com to gain control over their business operations, such as inventory management, quality of the assortment and inventory levels. This way Bol.com is able to offer better services to their customer and decease their impact on the environment at the same time.

In short, using good data visualization software is crucial to the success of online retailers. This adds massive value to a company and eventually to society. Achieving a more efficient way of shopping, with less products and packaging material that are wasted, will not only contribute to the satisfaction of the customer, but will also allow us to become a more environmentally friendly society (Bol.com & Duurzaamheid, n.d.).

References:

Hoe bol.com een datagestuurde organisatie wordt dankzij selfservice analytics van. (n.d.). Tableau. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://www.tableau.com/nl-nl/solutions/customer/How-self-service-analytics-from-Tableau-is-helping-bol-com-become-a-data-driven

Bol.com & Duurzaamheid. (n.d.). Bol.com. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://duurzaamheid.bol.com

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Versioning is the provisioning of two different versions or quality levels of the same product targeted at different consumer segments. Versioning is a type of price discrimination also known as quality discrimination (Hayes, 2020). By using versioning as a price strategy the company gives the consumer the option of buying a higher valued version of the product for a higher price and a lower valued version of the product for a lower price. This way, the company attempts to attract higher prices based on the willingness to pay of the customer. 

Companies that use versioning when their fixed costs are relatively large and their variable costs are relatively small. 

Around 2010 Microsoft started using versioning (Sanders, 2012). Before 2010, it was hard for Microsoft to engage in product and price discrimination, because they were generating enormous amount of cash operating as a monopoly without this price strategy.

When producing software, the marginal costs are essentially zero, but the fixed costs are substantial. Since Microsoft is a price setter, they initially chose to sell their products at a price that covers their fixed costs, but still allow them to make large profits, without losing their customers.

For a long time, Microsoft was not interested in versioning based on market segment, geography or per capita GDP (Sanders, 2012). Therefore, Microsoft moved toward price discrimination based on their customers willingness-to-pay for their software. They started offering different versions of their software for different priced based on the consumer segment. This way for example students or people with low incomes pay less for a simpler version of the software compared to people with higher incomes, who purchase the more advanced version for a higher price.

Microsoft also had cases in which product differentiation did not work. For example, Microsoft tried to differentiate the Vista operating system, which is a version of Microsoft Windows (Sanders, 2012). But Vista was not ready for prime time, due to a variety of technical, marketing and customer support reasons. 

After Vista, Microsoft continued to adapt versioning and price discrimination with the release  of Windows 7. The Home Premium version was priced at $199.99, the Professional version at $299.99, and the Ultimate version at $319.99. It is smart of Microsoft to offer three options, due to extremeness aversion consumers are most likely to pick the middle option, which will most likely generate a lot of income for Microsoft. Windows 7 was a big success, because it was a fast, stable and user-friendly operating system. 

This shows that not every type of software is suitable for versioning, but when adapted well it can lead to big gains for the company.

References:

Hayes, A. (2020, June 6). Versioning. Retrieved from Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/versioning.asp

Sanders, G. L. (2012). Developing New Products and Services. State University of New York at Buffalo: Saylor Foundation.