Dime Sale Calculator

This dime sale calculator will allow you to assess the amount of money you can expect from a dime sale. The calculator can show you the revenue for a dime sale that is already running, or allow you to calculate the optimal pricing strategies for your personal dime sale.

How to use the calculator: Input your starting price, increments, how many units have to be sold prior to increasing price, your price cap, total quantity of units sold, and click the "Calculate" button to find your results.

Reference

A dime sale/dimesale is a way of selling that encourages customers to purchase products swiftly prior to price rises being implemented. In this sort of sale, the seller selects a basic price that will be maintained until X number of units have been sold. Once this quantity of units has been sold, the unit cost goes up by Y dollars with every extra unit purchased, until a cap set by the seller is reached. Usually, X = 1 and Y = $0.10. When dime sales were first introduced, prices would go up by $0.10 per hour, giving this type of sale its name.

Dime sales with low starting prices will stop customers taking their time over their purchase decisions. They will be aware that with any hesitation, prices will rise. This means that dime sales encourage quick purchasing, but there is also more interest from consumers as they are interested to watch the price fluctuations.

Below are two examples of how a dime sale can work.

Example A

Alex wants to sell an e-book with a starting price of five dollars. He uses a dime sale to boost customer interest and improve profits. Once he has sold 30 books, the price will rise by $0.10 for each unit up to a maximum of $10. What revenue can he expect from the sale of 100 books?

In the calculator, with this example, we would enter a starting price of $5, $0.10 as the increment, 30 for the quantity of units sold prior to a price increase, $10 for highest price, and 100 for the total number of units sold. The calculation will show that the total earnings will be $727.50.

For calculation of the average profit per item, the revenue should be divided by the quantity of items sold; here $727.50 divided by 100 equals $7.275 per unit.

Example B

Alex is not happy with the profit of $7.275 per e-book on 100 sales, wanting to earn a minimum of $8.4 per item. He knows that he will not achieve any sales if the maximum price is more than $10. Therefore either the increment or the starting price must rise, or he must sell fewer e-books before raising prices.

If he switches the increment to $0.20 with a $6 starting price, he will make $842 in total on 100 books, i.e. $8.42 per unit.

Another way of achieving this is to begin increasing prices as soon as the first book is sold rather than wait for 30 sales; by doing this, he will have a total profit of $872.50 on 100 books, i.e., $8.725 per unit.