How Margin Master Thinks

What is this?

Margin Master is a pricing tool for independent retailers. Before the installation steps and the screen-by-screen chapters, it helps to know the three ideas the whole application is built around. Every later chapter leans on at least one of them, and each is repeated as a short callout where it applies.

Vendor suggested pricing is the baseline, not the answer

Your vendor's suggested retail and price levels are a great start toward what your price should be. But a single suggested price - or any one of the suggested price levels - cannot properly fit every store in every demographic in every region of the country. It does not hold true, and it does not make sense.

Margin Master starts from the vendor's price levels as the baseline, then adjusts for what only you know about your business:

• your own stores and how each one performs,
• local market conditions and the level of competition,
• the demographics you serve,
• each store's strengths and weaknesses.

The vendor data in the grid tells you where the vendor thinks the price should be. Your pricing strategy says where you want it to be. See Vendor Data, the Future Price Panel and Pricing Strategies.

Strategies are hierarchical

A pricing strategy is a list of steps that run from the top down. The general rules come first and set the tone for the whole store; the more specific sub-rules below them override the general rule wherever they apply.

That is what keeps pricing consistent - every SKU gets a price from some rule - while still allowing exceptions: a department, a product group, a single item or a competitor-matched line can be handled differently without disturbing everything else. Because the order carries meaning, the order is where most strategy mistakes live too. See Pricing Strategies.

Rounding is the quiet margin driver

Of everything Margin Master does, rounding is one of the most powerful - and least visible - ways to improve margin. Two stores can run the same strategy and end up with noticeably different margins purely because of how the final cents are set.

A rounding scheme decides where each calculated price lands: $4.97 or $4.99, $12.49 or $12.99. Done well it is transparent to the customer and worth points of margin across a store. See Rounding Schemes.

Where to go next

The handbook follows the path a new store takes: Installing (Part I), a tour of the main window (Part II), the required configuration for your point of sale and vendor (Part III), optional workspace customization (Part IV), then the basics (Part V) and, in Part VI, learning to select data, use the Future Price panel and build strategies. Advanced topics, updates, troubleshooting and getting help close the book.

Start with Prerequisites.