Hi, Don --

From a marketing standpoint, your idea is clearly a sales stimulant. It excited me, and my first thought was how I could apply this since I myself display at craft shows.

My second thought, though, was this: whose pocket does the $3 come out of?

The show's owner, who puts the whole thing together, makes money two ways: from admission charges and exhibitors' display fees. If the $3 comes out of his share, it could be pretty costly.

For example, a fair-sized show would have about 100 exhibitors and traffic of about 5,000. If the exhibitors' fee were $50 (typical for a show this size), that would make his total revenue $20,000. Covering that $3 browser buck fee would reduce his revenue by $15,000 and that's probably unfair since print and radio advertising costs can run pretty high. And that's before the cost of the venue itself, security, etc. The show could end up making no money at all.

Having the vendors individually absorb that $3 sounds more fair but some exhibitors are always more popular than others, so inevitably a small percentage would carry the brunt of the costs. Hopefully, the sales volume would help offset the lower profit, especially if customers purchased more than one item. This is, of course, the ideal scenario and the one you described in your post.

However, there are always plenty of bargain seekers at craft shows and these are the people who will want to maximize the value of their free $3, so they'll spend as little as possible (and try to dicker the price down, too). If they target items under $10, then vendors accepting those $3 browser bucks could not only lose most of their profit but even lose money on that particular sale. Too many browser bucks and the vendors would make no money for the show, either, and will decline to participate again.

As I said, this is indeed a GREAT idea, but to my view there's a glitch in covering the cost of implementation. Dividing the cost equitably by raising exhibitors' fees wouldn't really help. In the example above, in order to cover the $15,000 (traffic of 5,000 X $3) each of the 100 exhibitors would have to pay an additional $150. I doubt there'd be many takers at that price.

The best answer might be to raise the admission fee to $5 and take the browser bucks cost out of that. Coupled with a slight raise in exhibitors fees ($10-$15) and the cost is spread around to all with a stake in the success of the show.

I'm going to mention your idea to a couple of organizers of local shows and see what they think. There should be a way to make this work for everyone.

Thanks for posting such a great idea!

Eve §:)