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Eight ways to tweak the Skype Prime 30% fee
Let’s ignore if 30% is “too high” for a moment: Skype is just getting its feet wet and wants zero risk for this pilot project.
Better to ask: what are other options for Prime’s rate?
Quality. Discounts offered for high buyer feedback ratings weighted by dollars spent. Payout delays (120 days) drop to zero with a Gold consumer rating over 100 billed hours, for example.
Volume. Rates get better
as you have more experience. e.g 30% for your first hundred euros, 20% for your first 1000 euros, 10% above that.
Pooling. Rates get better for services offered through a “guild”, a “gang”, a “tribe”, a “school”, or a “company.” This creates some consistency, maybe even quality, and collective volume. Each group:
Establishes membership criteria. So all members of the Gnarly Wood Workers guild are carpenter union members with two years’ professional experience. Standardizes services delivered. So members of The Food Network Academy agree to upload all recipes they share in a session to a private web page the caller can see. Gets collective feedback. So members can see statistics for the group a whole, for the group vs. averages for the category, and for the individual vs. the group. Governs itself.
Liability/Insurance by Category and Country. Litigation risk is lower for music advice than medical advice. Litigation risk is much higher in the United States than in Japan. Skype can vary rates based on those odds and exposure.
Business Services. Maybe lower rate overall but a flat fee per year for collecting and reporting your national, provincial, local taxes.
Banking. Paying interest if you keep your money in your Skype account. Giving you a discount if you link your account to a PayPal/Skype credit card.
Recruiting. One month free for each seller you bring into the network who successfully bills 100 euro without customer complaint.
Mentoring. Lower rates when you help a less experienced seller by joining in a call.
Prime’s cost structure is a social engineering tool. It promotes supplier behavior that nourishes your marketplace when done well. It also discourages behavior that hurts it.
Complexity and nuance drive suppliers to game their compensation, sometimes with more effort than building new business. The virtue of today’s blunt one-size-fits-all rate is simplicity: everyone understands it and can easily choose to opt-in or opt-out and to set their prices. Now is the time for Skype to master the art of tuning the fee plan, perhaps by apprenticing with eBay?
Technorati tags: skype, skypeprime, prime, skypejournal, risk, unions, guilds, costs, economics, laboreconomics, cost, coststructure, compensation, rates, primerate, primerates, voip
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