Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Pricing Is A 100% Rip Off
Could someone explain to me why Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro is $449 at the US online store, but $998 (GBP499) at the UK online store?
It’s a 100% rip off. Literally. We pay 100% more.
Both products are downloadable. There can be no genuine reason to charge people in one country twice the amount of another for the same product. Even taking “sales tax” into account, the justification still isn’t there.
Help me out here… why is it acceptable to charge double for software depending on geo-location of the customer?
OK, I’ve just found this… so I’m not alone in ranting…
“Adobe Systems, producers of Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash, has long had a relatively chummy image compared to – say – Microsoft. But that might be changing, at least for some customers, as the company moves even beyond Redmond’s position on price differentials between the UK and US.
Of course, British consumers are well-accustomed to being charged higher prices for the same product. Despite occasional efforts by the EU [HA! Neil’s note] to prevent such milking of the price-demand curve, the baseline rule seems more and more to be that UK customers should pay the same price in pounds as Americans do in dollars. With the exchange rate almost two to one these days, that’s a very expensive bitter pill to swallow.”
(source)
And in the same article Adobe responded…
“We set pricing in each market based on customer research, local market conditions and the cost of doing business … the EU has 10 major languages, 4 major currencies … the costs of doing business in European markets are significantly higher per unit of revenue than in the US.”
DO ME A FAVOUR!
What a rubbish excuse. But, hey, I have a solution. Let me choose to spell FAVOR the same way as the American’s do, and download the US version… and pay the US price. I’d be happy to.
Until then, no thanks, Adobe.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Hi Neil,
They do it because they are allowed to. They all site that it costs more as it is not the same product as the USA. I did a test with another massive software company. I took a licence Number from a so called UK product and used a program disk purchased from the USA. Guess what it worked and I loaded the product. Another classic example from a few years ago when cars in the UK were more expensive than most of the rest of the World, this we were told was because it was cost more to market here (right hand drive etc). Then one year a very large American car company was found to have made a profit in only one country that year. Thats right the UK. It’s about time we got our Government to stop this.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Hi John,
Yes I remember the inflated car prices. But at least that had *some* small justification. How Adobe can even try to justify doubling the price of downloadable software is beyond my comprehension.
I guess if enough people boycott their products, they may pay attention. I don’t trust governments (UK or EU) to do anything useful.
Neil.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Adobe are both right and wrong at the same time. Sure, it costs a big company more money to produce and market products in Europe than it does in a single nation. But they forget two things.
Firstly, no-one forces them to; there are plenty of US software companies that don’t have European offices, don’t localize their software, yet still earn a packet. Secondly, Adobe has forgotten there’s this thing called the Internet. For a mere $9 a month you can have a USA street address and then legitimately order as a USA customer.
In other words, there is a quick and easy way around shopping cart systems which make you pay the higher price as soon as you enter a UK address.
Adobe - and other software giants - need to realise that global means global. I don’t know of any Internet Marketers (do you Neil…?) who have differential pricing with some weak argument about it costs more to produce something for different countries. Wake up Adobe - the world has moved on since you started out in business.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Hi Graham,
> I don’t know of any Internet Marketers (do you Neil…?) who have differential pricing <
I haven’t seen differential pricing. I would strongly object if I did see it, and refuse to endorse any such product.
I think the US-mailing address idea is interesting… but you still have to pay the postage to ship it to the UK, and I’m not sure what customs would then do with it… let it through, or add hefty import duties.
My main issue is that the darn thing is downloadable, yet they insist on doubling the price. Unforgivable.
Neil.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
That’s outrageous!
I haven’t seen any particularly good reason to own any version of Acrobat since v.5 and with this deliberate and cynical attempt to rip off the gullible British market yet again, I won’t be changing my opinions.
Shame on Adobe.
But, much more, shame on us for allowing such blatant over pricing to continue.
Martin
August 6th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your comment.
The new version allows you to embed Flash movies inside the PDF, which I thought was pretty cool. Adobe acquired Macromedia a while ago and finally brought the two technologies together in PDF’s. Although, I think you need the Pro version of Acrobat 9.
Then Adobe went and messed everything up with their stupid pricing model.
Neil.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I’d forgotten that you can create PDF files at createpdf.adobe.com.
When you sign up, you can create 5 files for free… but if you want to create more, you’re supposed to pay $9.99 per month or $99 per year.
Guess what? The subscription model is US and Canada only.
/slaps head.
Still, I guess you can “sign up and create 5 files for free” quite a few times…?
Thanks to Michael Campbell for the memory jog.
http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com/blog/
Neil.
August 30th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
i guess no one from UK will buy such thing.i myself from Sweden tend to buy things from US, anything possible since here is a lot expensive
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I have just found your blog! what a delight. I am new to the internet marketing world so I look forward to learning lots.
Your posts on adobe are so true. I really dont understand ? I have just bought Dragon Naturally speaking ( testing at the moment?) which I could have got at half the price in the states.
Take Care
I will be back
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:38 pm
“We set pricing in each market based on customer research, local market conditions and the cost of doing business … the EU has 10 major languages, 4 major currencies … the costs of doing business in European markets are significantly higher per unit of revenue than in the US.”
The UK does not have “10 major languages, 4 major currencies” as far as I am aware! This is twaddle. The overgrowing population of the UK must be as large as Australia I would think.
They can’t use the 10 different languages there, what excuse do they use?
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:30 am
Graham - How can you get a US address and order as a US customer? Unless you change your credit card details, you need to enter the correct address so they can cross check etc surely?
Yep, Adobe speaks “twiddle”! Hey, I bet they also complain about software piracy - this wild pricing doesn’t help them.
I’m sure if erveryone abstains from paying their slly prices, they’ll be forced to drop them sooner or later.