Title: How Iranian SMEs managers' perceive the electronic pricing process?

Authors: Shahriar Azizi

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Management, Shahid Beheshti University, P.O. Box 1983963113, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: In this article, electronic pricing process in electronic markets was studied, based on proposed six-step process. A 33-items questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha 0.831 was distributed and collected in nine industries and among 101 companies. One-sample t-test showed that the ten proposed goals are used by the companies in the first-pricing step. Using the electronic market leads to finding new customers, attracting competitors' customers and creating new products and services; but, does not lead to increase of buying volume of existing customers. Electronic market causes reduction of the eight types of costs. In electronic market, the information related to competitors' prices of products and services are able to be detected; but, competitors' costs cannot be obtained. Cost-oriented strategy will be applied in electronic market and price adjustment methods such as discounts (cash, volume, trade), price discrimination and adjusting based on customers' geographic location. But, price adjusting based on religious events has no usage.

Keywords: e-markets; e-pricing; electronic pricing; e-finance; electronic finance; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; Iran; electronic markets.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEF.2012.051173

International Journal of Electronic Finance, 2012 Vol.6 No.3/4, pp.298 - 310

Published online: 26 Dec 2012 *

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