by John Keller | Sep 28, 2011 | Fuel Price Management, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Fuel Pricing Software, Industry News
According to the latest MasterCard SpendingPulse report, U.S. gasoline consumption was down 2.7% compared to the previous year for the week ending September 23, 2011. For the four week average, demand was down 2.9% compared to the previous year. Demand was down 2% from the prior week. According to the report, that marks the 27th week in a row where demand has continued to fall.
The MasterCard report is based on sales transactions across 140,000 stations throughout the U.S.
From a fuel price management perspective, fuel analysts and fuel managers must use their fuel pricing software solutions to carefully monitor demand in each of their markets, and acknowledge that demand quite possibly is lower than previous years. Fuel analysts and managers mustn’t panic if they see demand trending downward, given the overall demand shifts across the nation as a whole.
by John Keller | Sep 26, 2011 | Fuel Price Management, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Industry News
Convenience Store News reports that three New Jersey gas stations are being charged with illegal price changes after Hurricane Irene. The stations are accused of raising their fuel prices multiple times in one day which is illegal in the state of New Jersey, and could result in fines of $1500 each. The State Office of Weights and Measures also investigated the gas stations for raising prices more than 10%, what New Jersey calls price gouging.
Fuel Pricing solutions such as PriceAdvantage can help in situations like this in three ways:
- Keep control of fuel price changes at Headquarters. The Fuel Price Management solution PriceAdvantage can be configured to remove the Store Manager from the fuel price change process, and initiate all fuel price changes only at headquarters. This means no unauthorized fuel price changes starting at the store.
- Set price change thresholds. PriceAdvantage allows price changes to be kept below the set threshold, meaning a price change can never be more than the set percentage over the current price. In this case, if the threshold is set to 9%, any price change of more than 9% would be rejected as unauthorized.
- Reduce audit time. PriceAdvantage provides a series of reports making it easy to show auditors the price change history at each store. That means when an audit is inevitable, the time it takes to provide the needed information is reduced to minutes.
These New Jersey stores did not have PriceAdvantage in place, but if they had, their troubles would have likely been reduced, and possibly eliminated entirely.
The original NACS article is here.
by John Keller | Sep 22, 2011 | Fuel Price Management Solutions, Industry News, PriceAdvantage
Employee error led a c-store to sell Premium fuel at $2.65, which was $1 less than the correct price. The lost profits were caused by an employee entering the wrong price into the RaceWay fuel price management system. According to the News & Messenger, and insidenova.com, the Manassas Virginia Raceway station was unable to quantify exactly how much money RaceWay lost during the time of the incorrect price. But nearby competitors had the Premium fuel price at $3.68 and $3.71, more than $1 higher.
In the RaceWay fuel pricing process, corporate officials determine prices for the day and communicate those prices to the store managers. The store managers then manually enter the prices for each grade into the store computer. As an alternative to the RaceWay system, the PriceAdvantage Fuel Price Management solution provides a way to automatically set store prices based on what fuel analysts at the headquarters office determine is the optimized fuel prices for the day. By removing the store managers from the fuel pricing process, PriceAdvantage removes the chance for the kind of human error experienced by the RaceWay store.
The original news story may be found here.
by John Keller | Sep 21, 2011 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Fuel Price Optimization, Retail Fuel Margins
Rutter’s has been using PriceAdvantage as their fuel pricing solutions for four years. Rutter’s uses PriceAdvantage on a daily basis to analyze store volume and margin performance, along with competitor movement, to determine the optimized prices at each store. Then fuel managers initiate fuel price changes from their headquarters office. in conjunction with their Skyline electronic price signs and Radiant Point Of Sale systems, PriceAdvantage pushes the new prices to each store, and sends back a confirmation message to headquarters once the price change is complete at the POS, electronic price signs, and pumps.
As part of their upgrade to PriceAdvantage version 3.4, Rutter’s has extended their PriceAdvantage fuels solutions to GasBuddy OpenStore, allowing them to update the GasBuddy site with up-to-the-minute gas prices whenever the PriceAdvantage automated fuels pricing system confirms the price change as completed. With this GasBuddy integration, Rutter’s has essentially extended their retail fuel price marketing, allowing PriceAdvantage to command and control fuel prices beyond the physical electronic gas price signs, to virtual signs on the Web.
by John Keller | Sep 13, 2011 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management, Fuel Price Management Solutions, PriceAdvantage
CEFCO Convenience stores has extended their PriceAdvantage fuel price management solutions to their 69 newly acquired stores, bringing their total fuel pricing software system store count to 192. CEFCO successfully completed the acquisition of an additional 69 stores on August 15, 2011, and in just under one month they had PriceAdvantage managing fuel prices at all the new stores. CEFCO originally implemented their PriceAdvantage fuel pricing software to their 123 store chain at the time in under three months back in September 2010.
The CEFCO fuel price management solutions manage fuel prices from headquarters out to the VeriFone and Gilbarco POS systems, to the pump, and to Skyline electronic signs. This accelerated implementation time table is partly due to their quick adoption of their PriceAdvantage Web solution, allowing fuel pricing decisions to be made over the browser via the BlackBerry. PriceAdvantage allows CEFCO to carefully monitor daily volumes provided by PDI, as well as daily cost and margin, and competitor movement, to implement optimized retail fuel prices in minutes.
by John Keller | Sep 8, 2011 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Industry News, PriceAdvantage
At The Spinx Company, OPIS Radius reports are providing real-time competitive price imports that drive new fuel pricing strategy changes for 70+ stores. While Spinx Store Managers continue to submit their daily competitor surveys first thing each morning, the OPIS Radius reports provide additional competitive intelligence, allowing the Spinx Fuel Analysts to quickly respond to competitor moves throughout the day. The OPIS Radius reports provide data that Fuel Analysts can view in the PriceAdvantage dashboard, the screen in the software from which the Fuel Analysts initiate fuel price changes to the store. That dashboard is also where Fuel Analysts can see the confirmation time and date stamp of when the price change was automatically completed at the POS, sign and pump. The combination of PriceAdvantage and the OPIS Radius reports allow Spinx to get the right price to the right store at the right time faster than their previous email and corporate intranet system.
The Spinx Company formerly relied on MPSI, recently acquired by KSS, for their fuel price management solution. It was the ability to view OPIS Radius information in a PriceAdvantage consolidated view, along with volume, price history and current margin, as well as the roundtrip fuel price management automated closed loop process, that convinced the Spinx Company to implement PriceAdvantage at all their stores.
