Office supply giant optimizes pricing

Staples Australia and New Zealand is refreshing its pricing strategy.



Staples Australia and New Zealand completes more than 80,000 deliveries daily for consumers and small businesses under 20 employees. However, the chain relied on a legacy-based monitoring tool to establish pricing metrics. To remain competitive in an increasingly omnichannel landscape — especially among business customers — the company was ready to revamp its pricing efforts.



The chain’s head of pricing Charnine Short, who was recently Staples' European pricing manager for B2B, re-evaluated the company's competitive insights and prepared to refresh the chain’s pricing strategy. By partnering with Revionics, the chain created a customer-centric rules-based pricing program.



"With Revionics' real-time online competitive price monitoring and its automated rules-based price capabilities, we can offer small businesses throughout Australia the assurance that they are receiving the best price available, 24/7," said Short. "We want to leverage Revionics' capabilities to drive market growth in our B2C channel, create market-relevant pricing for our B2B non-contract business, and design more targeted promotional pricing.”



Based on early results, Revionics has yielded a 20% higher match rate than the legacy system with more accurate competitive matching, as well. In addition, Staples Australia and New Zealand values the Revionics' team's responsiveness, and ability to execute on their rapid implementation timeline, according to the chain.



This division operates separately from Framingham, Massachusetts-based Staples. In March, the office supply retailer entered an agreement to sell its Australia- and New Zealand-based operations to private equity firm Platinum Equity. The transaction is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2017.