Why are the E-Horoscopes not less expensive than your printed hardcopy
horoscopes?
Our position to pricing of printed copies versus online copies is this:
-- We love our printed and bound reports. We love to ship them to our
international customers, and despite a lot of pressure towards emailing
our reports, we have resisted a long time. We do actually not want all of
our customers to move into the 'electronic channel' but we hope that many
stick to the physically delivered reports.
-- You pay for the content of our astrological reports, and not for the
paper or ink. A lot of effort and talent has gone into design and development
of our horoscopes, into developing the software, into writing the text, into
translations. These efforts continue, and their cost does not depend on the
form of the delivery.
-- Creating perfect software for the online-delivery has
been an effort which has cost us several person-years of work. This investment
has to be recovered from sales, and hopefully will be recovered over time.
Until that has happened, each E-horoscope costs us more than a printed copy
would.
-- The authors of the reports receive the same royalties, based on the numbers
of reports sold. These royalties do not depend on the form of delivery. They
constitue a substantial part of our operating cost. Also marketing is not
less expensive for E-horoscopes than for hardcopy.
-- While some spendings are saved by not having to print and bind the reports,
more spending occurs on other levels, in post-sales support.
With the immediate online delivery,
our staff does not handle the reports before they are downloaded by our
customers. We handle the orders only later, for accounting purposes, before
the actual credit card charges are made. With printed reports, a lot
of customer errors are caught and corrected in that handling phase (badly
spelled names, birth data inconsistent with previous orders, improbable
choices of languages, elimination of duplicate orders, etc etc). Now, all
these 'customer errors' appear in the
downloaded reports. What happens is that many customers get back to us
later, to have these errors corrected.
-- The introduction of the E-Horoscopes is very new for us. We have to make
our experiences, and will then be able to make price decisions based on the
actual experience. If we find that our revenue situation has improved, you can
be assured that we will spend it wisely. In the past, we have found that
becoming more efficient has enabled us to survive, to keep up our
high standards, and our extensive free services. We hope this path continues.
Astrodienst has been committed to quality astrology services since its
first steps in 1980, and we will remain on that track. You may find cheaper
reports elsewhere, but not better ones. The choice is absolutely yours.
