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Smart firms are not worried about the impact of the Internet on pricing, but realise that they have the unique opportunity to exploit new options and improve their marketing performance. Multi‐channel pricing is one of the most interesting opportunities firms can exploit in the digital economy. Reviews the existing literature on pricing on the Internet and on multi‐channel pricing. Presents the results of an exploratory research on price opportunities perceived by firms. Offers a picture of the possible multi‐channel options available to firms and highlights the importance of the value for and of the customer.

The purpose of this research is to take into consideration the country effect in online and offline environments and compares price levels and dispersion online v. offline across the two largest Continental European markets, thus adding a new dimension in price comparisons and multichannel pricing strategies.

Based on an empirical analysis of data collected in one product category (CDs), our findings for France and Germany show that price levels ‐including shipping costs – are always higher online than offline in each country and price dispersion is persistent across markets. Calculating mean prices for the two countries, ANOVA tests reveal significant differences among the two sets of data. Using standard deviation as the measurement for price dispersion, Levene statistics reveal a higher degree of online price dispersion than offline and statistically significant differences between the two sample countries.

Even if our approach need to be extended to more product categories and more countries, our article may be interesting for practitioners, policy makers and managers. It clearly shows that the “frictionless capitalism and cost transparency hypothesis” has proven to be wrong most of the time even if many retailers still believe they must sacrifice the possibility of pricing up when they go on the internet. As demonstrated by our findings, retailers can take advantage of online relative indifference to price to capture some margin premium and enjoy excellent results.

Our results also demonstrate that, even if results show some similarities and common trends, differences among France and Germany still remain important. As a consequence, marketers should continue to approach the European marketplace with full awareness of its diversity.

Supplementary fees such as restocking fees, nonrefundable shipping and handling fees, and cancellation fees have become prevalent in the USA, and customers as well as the popular media have raised serious concerns about them. This paper aims to test whether such fees could benefit consumers because they lead to lower prices.

Transaction data that include prices and fees were collected from different service providers, including hotels, airlines, online retailers, and restaurants. The data were collected from different countries at different points in time. Cross‐sectional and panel data sets were used to test the relationship between fees and prices.

The empirical results indicate that on average higher fees lead to lower prices for the majority of customers who do not abuse customer‐friendly service policies. These findings are valid for different service industries in different countries even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using panel econometric models.

The results are consistent with the hypothesis that special fees are used to limit the abuse of customer‐friendly service policies, thus helping service providers to offer lower prices to the majority of customers who do not abuse these policies.

The purpose of this paper is to show how yield management and dynamic pricing, which originated in the airline industry, are now diffusing in other service industries. The aim is to demonstrate that these techniques can be profitably applied to telecommunications and similar sectors and to examine the particular conditions of their implementation, development and efficiency.

The main concepts of yield management, dynamic pricing and CRM are carefully scrutinized. Also discussed is the concept of natural demand curve that aims at reaching a better compromise between the capacity of a company and the demand in an environment where services cannot be sold in advance. In order to sustain the analysis and demonstrate its managerial implications, five case studies are presented that exemplify some aspects of yield management techniques in the telecommunication sector.

Since the telecommunications are undergoing a process of increased competition and dynamic convergence, yield management techniques can help telecom operators to optimize the benefits they can derive from a subtle management of information networks and partnerships. However, such an approach is more difficult to implement in the telecommunication industry than in the airlines sector because of the difficulty to control (and sometimes refuse) network access to customers.

Capacity and revenue management become critical differentiation factors in improving service quality, loyalty and profitability. Given the increase in competitive pressure, the main objective of operators to sell customer access database to potential partners represents a radical change in the nature of financial and information flows and leads to a “customized management of services supply”.

In theory, joint ventures do not sound too complicated. There are decisions to be made and contracts to be drawn up of course, but basically they are just about two or more firms pooling their expertise for mutually beneficial effects. What’s more, they are nothing new and hundreds of organizations are forming alliances all the time. So why do they find it so hard to get it right?