Creating value with interactive pricing mechanisms - a Web service-oriented architecture

Lower transaction costs and new possibilities to interact with customers online have led to a plethora of interactive pricing mechanisms on the Internet. While some of these such as various online auction formats stem from the offline world, others such as reverse pricing had previously been unknown. Interactive pricing mechanisms let buyers actively participate in the price discovery and their usage offers sellers a chance to increase sales by means of price discrimination and attraction of new customer segments. Implementation of such pricing functionality however is often time-consuming and costly. Therefore, we propose a Web-Service-oriented architecture enabling sellers to use interactive pricing mechanisms on a scalable basis. All mechanisms can be individually designed for each product to accommodate for different product characteristics and special seller needs.