I am curious why full-version Poser 5 is sold on-line on many sites for barely more than the upgrade price from Poser4+Pro Pack?

Every person who buys a full version of Poser 5 becomes a new customer in a growing base. Those buying upgrades are existing customers. The wider the base of existing customers, the more future upgrades they sell.

Also some sites, like physical stores, offer "loss leaders". That's a product where the pric eis so incredibly good (sometimes even less than the store pays for the product) that customers end up looking around the store and buying lots more. Hopefully (from the store's POV) not checking to see if each and every item is a good deal - so the store can perhaps manage to "sting" the punters with some higher-profit-margin products while the punter is online/instore.

My recent experience has been that the reduced price of Poser 5 is only available to residents within North America and has to be bought for full price if you live in Britain as I do.

Amazon for example seems to be offering one price range to America and another to Europe. Sadly I had to pay full price for this a few weeks ago. It really smarts to see the lower price available to some countries, but not to others, particularly when distribution is no problem in the UK.

Pauline Worcestershire England UK

Curious Labs just sent out their newsletter. The price they are charging for Poser 5 is $199 for North and South American customers. They have just opened their european webstore and are running a specials on Poser 5 and the bundles. They didn't cite the prices but said that you could save $86 eurodollars on Poser 5 upgrade.

This was my first purchase ever of Poser. It certainly has not endeared me to Curious Labs. I paid 499 euros plus 15 for shipping a couple of weeks ago. No wonder I felt disgruntled when I saw the full version of Poser 5 selling at Amazon.com a day or so later for $139 the price having yo yoed from $349 the day I decided to purchase it.

Curious Labs say it's for the USA distribution only and that is their response. They seem indifferent to appeasing a possible long term customer. In the UK customer relations normally refund a price difference if you can find the product available elsewhere at a lower price.

I wouldn't mind having paid the full price so much if the manual was up to scratch. Fortunately I can see the potential of the product and am sure that most of the problems I'm experiencing are due to user inexperience on my part.

I can see that people have created fantastic artwork and I hope one day to be able to do that too. Ultimately the price will be immaterial if I can crack this and get the results I want. I can see I'm going to be asking lots of questions......

The concept of "loss-leading" applies to high demand products, which the retailer knows that people are going to searching out en-mass. Classic examples are supermarket bread and milk. On online stores, eagerly anticipated video games are often tagged as loss leaders. One of the most recent and most successful examples was the latest Harry Potter tome. Sadly P5 most definitely doesn't fall into the loss-leader catagory since by all accounts its been a very difficult product to shift. Loss leading with a slow seller simply doesn't cut the mustard. Recent cut price sales of the product have infact been the result of stock clearences, and, as such, fairly temporary. Retailers, especially online, simply can't have cash tied up in stock. Even though it seems to be a case of thowing good money after bad, for retail companies, freeing the cash up (even at a loss) does allow it to be recycled into higher turnaround, and hence faster money generating products. Losses made in stock clearence sales can be quickly recovered by reinvesting capital in the right stock. Even so, for companies like CL, it does provide some useful data on prices and sales, so it may well help to trigger future price cuts. After all, its better to sell a thousand at ten bucks than one at a thousand. Both P4 and ProPack (upgrade) were originally priced at a little over $100 each when they were first released, but in the 18 or so months before the scheduled release of P5, CL increased the prices to their current levels, (IIRC) $219 P4, $199 ProPack (upgrade) and $379 for the P4/ProPack bundle. The strategic reason for these prices increases was that P5 was intended to "storm" the mid range market at $549 (full). The P4/ProPack prices established a fairly linear upgrade level (around $200 between products) to support this. The upgrade prices to P5 were originally intended to have been $179 for P4/ProPack users and $379 for P4 users (ouch). Unfortunately, despite hefty price cutting in the face of adverse market reaction in the run up to the release of P5, the P4 and ProPack prices have stuck at their artificially high levels, at least until now. The new sales price of P4 is, however encouraging, and CL may well realise that there is some market for a more reasonably priced ProPack upgrade. Bill