Imagine you arrive in town with your friends, and you can’t agree where to stay. You want somewhere economical in a cheapo motel, one friend wants to paint the town red, and the other wants to go middle of the road and stay in the Doubletree.

Then you all end up in the same lobby!

In Jack Vance’s SF novel Big Planet that’s exactly what happens – and it’s set up that way so that the town’s inhabitants know who are the cheapskates and who are the big spenders. The product is the same, but it’s marketed differently.

So let’s think how that might apply to Amazon. For instance, you sell a dog harness. Is that a single product?

Nope. Rick the Backwoodsman is not going to buy a pink leash and diamante collar for Grunt, the German Shepherd. Ellie the Wall Street Woman probably gets sensible matte black for Wolfram the Weimaraner. But pink and diamante? Stephanie’s chihuahua Cutesy will love it.

So product varieties are the way to expand. It might just need a difference in marketing; the same product could sell to the hunting, shooting, hound owner that’s bought for a pet pooch, but you’ll need to sell its ability to cope with tough conditions in the field, rather than the comfort and good behavior of poochy-poos at the mall.

Or you might need to offer different colors, different sizes, or different levels of functionality. That’s how camera brands work; you can buy a cheapish compact, or an expensive mirrorless camera with swappable fish-eye and zoom lenses, or anything in between.

You can also offer different price levels. Some brands only play at one price level; Hermes and Louis Vuitton only sell expensive bags. Others offer several different levels. If you think of an auto maker, you’ll see how their products are graded by cost, from the small, cheap runabout to the expensive executive and sports cars.

The problem, of course, is that if a buyer pays more money but gets exactly the same thing, they are nor going to be happy. In this case you need to offer a slightly different package.

A good example here is Pelikan fountain pens. They have pens that run from school pens (Germans still use them at school) all the way up to several thousand dollar hand-painted pens. At each level, you get a nicer box, a bigger pen, a better filling system, and at a particular stage, a gold nib instead of steel. You can use any of them to write with, but few people will say the school pen and the high-end pen are “really exactly the same, so it’s not worth spending the money”.

Most people will, though, have an idea at the back of their minds how much they are prepared to spend on a pen.

Now imagine my idea is I was willing to spend $100. But suddenly, I see that there’s a sale on, and I can get a $200 pen for $100. Do you think I would be tempted?

Guess what? That’s how discounts work!

And you can have your product both discounted and not discounted at the same time. For instance, you can use a coupon offer just to your email newsletter or your Facebook followers, or just use it to people using Vipon. You don’t have to discount it on your regular Amazon listing, and people who go straight on to Amazon will never know.

Hopefully this blog post has provided you with some interesting food for thought. You may never see your products quite the same way again!