My heart bleeds for today's tragedy. May peace and justice prevail in the end... After turning on the morning news, I checked the gold spot. At that time, gold was at $289.00, a significant jump. An issue came to mind. I've considered it before, but because the price of gold has been none-too-exciting in recent months, I didn't resolve the issue and chose to ignore it for the time. The issue: There are those of us who price our website products in national currencies. A good shopper, noticing a sudden, significant jump in the gold spot (and consequently the e-gold exchange rate), could receive quite a bargain by taking advantage of the inflated gold spot. Let's assume (arguendo) that the upward push is brief (say, lasting less than a day) but powerful (5% or more). Moreover, let's also assume that the retailer for one reason or another will be unable to outexchange at the more advantageous rate. How does an online e-gold accepting retailer deal with this exchange risk? An obvious solution is to price our products in grams (of e-gold). However, since most of my customers use their credit cards when making a purchase, pricing in grams would deter them from making that purchase. A dual pricing system could be used (i.e. listing prices in both a national currency and in grams of e-gold), but this is clumsy and tedious. The way I've dealt with this so far is to price low-margin items (e.g. gold bullion) in grams, and higher-margin items (e.g. professionally graded gold coins) in dollars. This isn't completely satisfactory, though, as I'm not allowing my credit card customers to purchase certain items, while savvy/fortuitous e-gold users could time their purchases so as to receive killer deals. While I generally prefer my e-gold customers (and am happy to give discounts for the use of e-gold), at some point a significant gold jump would conceivably eliminate any profit I might realize on a particular product. This risk is even more pronounced for those businesses with low profit margins on all of their products. I think this is really a larger issue: how do we convince "the average Joe" that e-gold is good money in the face of such an exchange risk? Many (or most?) people have great misconceptions about gold, its risk and its worth as a store of value. How do we overcome this? Regards, Chris www.GoldenGrams.com http://two-cents-worth.com/?230097 --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Did you know that e-gold Ltd. stores more gold on behalf of customers than many countries? See http://www.gold.org/Gra/Gra1.htm and the e-gold Examiner at http://www.e-gold.com/examiner.html for details.
