I did, and the bigger margins were just a couple of dollars when all was said and done. In the end, I was still wasting my time with either option. Not complaining because I learned a lot from it.
If you spend 75 cents to earn a dollar on one customer and can spend 25 cents to earn a dollar on another customer, you'd be dumb not to take customer 2.
That's exactly what I was suggesting: If you are stuck in a low margin business and see that a provider such as google is screwing up your margins, you should really try to work on another idea which has higher margins.
Working on a low margin business is a choice! You can always ditch it and try to find something with higher margins (= higher value created for users).
My experience was 100% different (but also 6+ years ago). Margins just weren't enough to build it into estimates and it was nearly impossible to sell it to clients as a line item.
There's more to being in a high-margin business than just putting your prices up and watching the money roll in. It depends (among other things) upon what you're selling. My sense is that what Google overlooked was the opportunity to add value.
I agree ... although chasing billionths-of-a-cent margins seems pretty pointless too. It is a good thing that there are lots of other options: Stochastic matching? Auction over order-book?
Don't disagree with anything you've said and if your margins are low and volumes are high enough it will be worth trying to shave off some of the fees.
But for a lot (the majority?) of businesses probably want to focus on other things.
I think parent meant it's too cheap? I have a license for Excel, so I can confidently say that the margins work for me, for my expenses and lifestyle. Assuming I hit at least 100 customers, of course. At 500 or 1000 customers I'd retire and write a book.
In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners.
Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
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