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 28, 2011 | Fuel Pricing Technology, Industry News
According to the US Energy Information Administration, demand for finished motor gasoline including “fuel ethanol blended into motor gasoline” is down for the first six months of 2011. The first six months of 2011, which is the most recent data captured by the US EIA, shows the per month average for motor fuels consumption down 2%, compared to the first six months of 2010. The monthly consumption average for the first six months of 2011 is 2% lower than 2009 as well.
Fuel Managers are wise to budget their fuel volume plans based on this ongoing decline in demand averages, acknowledging that the overall market in their area could very well be shrinking.
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 23, 2011 | Fuel Pricing Technology, PriceAdvantage
Skyline has successfully load tested PriceAdvantage with the VeriFone Sapphire system by sending 25,000 fuel price changes, without error. “Skyline labs routinely stress tests every PriceAdvantage version including POS integrations, in order to satisfy the demands of our customers” said John Keller, Sr. Product Manager in the PriceAdvantage division. “We’re proud of what our team and our product is able to handle when it comes to scaling to the demands of the large enterprise” Keller continued.
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.
