Who decides, and at what price

Context

After the show, the next job was turning interest into stores. That meant two things: a sales trip through Southern California, and pricing for a Korean-American online grocery platform that wanted to carry our mala line.

The problem

Both looked simple. Plan a route. Set a price. Both turned out to be about the same question: who actually makes the decision, and what will it cost them?

What I did

A route, redrawn

I planned a multi-day trip through Los Angeles and Orange County: 48 stores on four routes, two starting from La Puente to cover the San Gabriel Valley and Koreatown, and two from Anaheim Hills to cover northern and southern Orange County. I included all 22 of 99 Ranch’s Southern California locations and five GW Supermarket stores, and built a color-coded map so the team could see the chains at a glance.

My first version was organized by geography: shortest driving distance between stops. That was wrong.

At the Korean supermarket chains, branch managers usually can’t make buying decisions. Purchasing is centralized. Walk into a branch first and you get “talk to headquarters,” and you’ve used up your first impression. So I reorganized the whole trip to start with the chains’ headquarters in Koreatown. One buyer there can open many stores at once.

A price floor before anyone gets in the car

I also flagged a risk nobody had raised yet. If we gave small independent stores terms that let them sell below H Mart’s shelf price, we would damage our relationship with our biggest customer in order to win our smallest ones. I recommended setting a minimum advertised price before the trip started.

Pricing as behavior

For the online platform I priced 28 items, including three bundles. Every price ended in .99. Instead of explicit volume discounts, the discount was built into the bundle prices, and I checked that no combination of individual items was ever cheaper than a bundle.

Later I expanded the line with new mala tiers and two new bundles. Along the way I noticed a ladder problem: a four-pack worked out cheaper per unit than a ten-pack, which teaches customers to buy less.

Two kinds of margin

When the platform changed its commission, I rebuilt the pricing model. The useful part was separating two numbers that people kept mixing up: the margin on a product, and the margin on an order once the commission and a flat shipping fee came out. On small orders, the flat shipping fee alone ate about 29% of revenue. Same product, very different answer depending on which number you looked at. I recommended positioning the smaller bundle as an add-on rather than a main purchase.

Making it easy to cook

I also produced the product detail pages for three mala products on the platform, and how-to-cook cards for the packaging in Korean, English and Chinese.

What I learned

A sales route should follow decision-making power, not geography. Visit in order of distance and you meet a lot of people who can’t say yes.

When you add a channel, the first thing to set isn’t the price. It’s the floor. A conflict with an existing customer costs more than any new sale.

And margin isn’t one number. Showing the difference between product margin and order margin is what turned the pricing discussion from opinions into a decision.