The eight-staff Leicester-based business launched the RRP Insights feature on Monday (21 August).
When a reseller gets a price in Haybrooke’s print buying platform PDQ, the platform uses its access to the market to guide them as to a recommended selling price for the requested specification. The algorithm written intelligently by the business looks at aggregate pricing for the specification throughout the supply chain in order to do this.
“The idea of showing a recommended retail price or providing insights into that to our users was really borne out of our observation of how the system was being used,” John Roche, chief executive of Haybrooke, told Printweek.
“Obviously our system services resellers of print, and occasionally when we took on board a new customer – a new reseller – they would get a better price in our system than they’d previously been paying.
“We noticed that they can then enhance the selling price to their customer, because they’re buying more effectively, and that means they get greater value when they sell it at the same price – because they’ve been able to source it more cost-effectively.”
He added: “We’ve had conversations with these users who have been absolutely delighted that they’ve been able to source more cheaply and create more value, and when we discussed with them how they originally approached pricing, it was very typically to add a markup to the cost that you can buy it at cheapest.
“What we started to realise and understand is that that approach – whilst relatively proven – may be missing those opportunities when they can source a product especially cheaply but are not taking into account the rest of the marketplace in terms of what they could source it at, and are just selling it at cheapest plus 20%.”
“Our system has very broad access to the marketplace, and when we return a price to a user in our system, we’re showing them 50 or 60 results commonly. So it occurred to us that if we built an algorithm that was able to analyse the trend in the marketplace, we could offer some advice on typical RRP.”
As a consequence of the new algorithm, Roche said the system will also be able to state if the fulfiller price is ‘good value’, ‘great value’, or ‘exceptional value’ – and if the buyer can therefore potentially sell the product at a greater margin.
PaaS was initially launched in January 2021 as a trade-only outsourcing service that connects print buyers with printers.
Last year Haybrooke added two major new features to PaaS: built-in instant messaging between customers and suppliers, and a module for supplier ratings by customers. While earlier this year it expanded PaaS to enable printers to use the system for outsourcing.
Earlier this year Haybrooke also went live with a new feature in PDQ that allows printers to automatically match the price of their competitors.
Haybrooke, which now has hundreds of printers in the PaaS system, is expecting revenues of £2m for the current financial year.
