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Business-to-business (B2B) sellers grant customer-specific discounts to select buyers. According to resource-based and competitive response theories, customer-specific discounts can give buyers a cost advantage over other buyers that compete for the same end-customer demand. If other buyers become aware of this advantage, discount spillover ensues as those buyers seek counterbalancing discounts, compressing the seller’s profitability. In accordance with today’s multichannel B2B environment, the authors theorize differential effects on the seller’s profitability via spillover to offline-competing and online-competing buyers. The authors test their framework across large-scale field studies with two different collaborating sellers and find broad support for their hypotheses. If managers fail to consider competitive implications of customer-specific discounts, their effects can spill over to competing buyers, resulting in approximately three times the lost profitability. However, spillover-conscious deployment, such as by targeting buyers that limit e-commerce price transparency, allows sellers to virtually eliminate adverse effects of discount spillover.

What appeals to you more: a pair of jeans on sale for 8% off, or the same pair listed for 7.7% off? Any rational shopper will know that the 8% discount will save them more money and is the more attractive deal. And any sensible retailer will recognize not only that offering a higher discount will appeal to more shoppers but also that listing a more precise discount with a decimal place makes for a less attractive sign than a nice, round number does. But are things ever that simple? A paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology describes a series of experiments how consumers perceive discounts and why. Their counterintuitive finding is that customers perceive more precise discount figures as being fleeting offers, which gives them a sense of urgency about making a purchase decision and significantly increases their intention to purchase compared with discount figures that have been rounded up. What's more, it has been found that the sense of urgency consumers feel when looking at precise discount figures is more pronounced than when they're faced with signs indicating that a round-number discount is available \"today only.\"