Tier Level Pricing - Why All The Secrecy?

I guess, in a way, our tier level pricing may look like a customer loyalty program, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with that. Really, It goes a little deeper than that. Maybe we're a little paranoid, but we know that our competitors and some of our manufacturers monitor our pricing, newsletters, and even this blog. Over the years we've taken some heat for pricing too low. We believe that it is possible that a competitor may sign up for our newsletter and make a purchase just to see our member pricing. Having done that they would be at tier level 1 pricing. Do they want to try to get to tier level 2 and then tier level 3? Probably not. We struggle constantly with how much information to give our members about tier level pricing in our newsletter, because we know that if we give our members that information, we are also giving it to our competitors and manufacturers. Let's face it, the Internet is a wonderful thing, but it does have its' drawbacks. We are also aware that our competitors won't hesitate to call our manufactures to ask them to put pressure on us to raise our prices, it has happened more times than we care to mention. We believe that in using multiple tiers our competitors will never really know what our bottom line price is, they simply won't want to try hard enough to move through the layers. They'll give up. We can also assume that if we go out in this blog or in our newsletter and tell our members exactly what they need to do to get to our tier level 3 pricing, we'll be telling our competitors as well. Then, we've given them a decision to make. They would then know that for x amount of dollars they can see our tier level 3 pricing. Would it be worth it to them? Maybe, it depends on who they are and what they think they would stand to gain. As it stands today we still catch a little heat for our pricing from time to time, but we've never heard a peep about our "Unbeatable Member Pricing"; we'd like to keep it that way. So call it a member loyalty program, underground pricing or just a company working hard everyday to put its' members interests above all others. I guess it's just what it is, and until we can be sure that we can give you what you want without having to answer to our competitors and/or manufacturers, we're just going to have to keep this on the down-low.