“A playful move but one that, if successful, has potentially further reaching implications for the fast fashion sector and other areas of retail where discounting is heavily baked into strategy.
For all retailers there is a peak window to trade full price, with this window narrower or longer depending on category and strategy. Within the online fashion sector, this window has both become shorter and variable, with consistent promotional activation to drive volume. In a limited scope a service like Nibble could up conversion rates by using retailer knowledge of when a product is due to drop in price, allowing a minimum discount ahead of this and ensuring greater margin while helping shoppers feel they have an 'exclusive' discount.
The playful element of 'haggling' will appeal to some consumers, indeed, as highlighted by Mintel's Online Retailing: Marketplaces and Peer-to-peer Selling - UK - 2023 a fifth (24%) of those who use marketplaces where prices can be bartered say they use such sites to be able to negotiate prices. The difficulty of integrating variable pricing is that it can disenfranchise some shoppers, while adding further complexity to pricing structures, which many consumers already find confusing. So a playful move, but one that will be notable to watch the development of, particularly as Nibble already counts 300 brands and retailers within its client base.”