Can one pricing strategy really work across a entire network?

A charge point operator (CPO) runs a -10% evening discount across 800 stations to capture demand after rush hour, when utilisation begins to fall.

But 40 of these stations are busy most evenings, so that -10% isn't needed, it just gives away margin on sessions that were happening anyway.

At idle stations, -10% is small enough that it's unlikely to shift demand meaningfully to improve utilisation.

The same problem exists in reverse with premiums: at stations where demand is already high, higher prices make sense, but at quiet locations, that premium simply pushes potential charging sessions elsewhere.

Same rule, two different outcomes, both unwanted; that’s the result of a network-wide pricing strategy.

Why this happens

Every CPO knows demand varies from station to station. A commuter hub behaves differently from a rural charger, a motorway site behaves differently from a destination charger. 

Pricing for those differences consistently, across every station, is the real challenge.

Most CPOs already run:

• Day vs. night tariffs 
• Weekday vs. weekend tariffs 

But further granularity is limited, and therein lies the problem. Once the same pricing strategy is applied everywhere, some stations will inevitably be over- or under-priced relative to how busy they actually are. 

So what you really need is a strategy that can price each station based on its own performance. 

But predicting demand at each station in your network, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is a monumental task without automation.

Even a modest network needs someone watching every station and adjusting its price, day by day. Scale that to hundreds or thousands of stations, and no pricing team would be able to keep pace.

So pricing ends up being applied at much broader levels, because tailoring it for each station simply isn’t a practical approach.

Where it leaves your network

The consequence is predictable, whichever version of network-wide pricing you're running:

• A single flat rate leaves money on the table at your busiest stations, and isn't competitive at your quietest ones
• Network-wide discounts mean busy stations receive reductions they never needed
• Network-wide premiums mean quiet stations become even less attractive

However you apply network-wide pricing, some part of the network is penalised by a strategy that isn’t tailored to its demand.

What comes next

The problem isn't choosing the right pricing strategy, it's expecting it to be right for every station.

Today's pricing approaches have to be broad enough for people to manage manually, which is why so many CPOs have to rely on blunt pricing rules.

In the next Cariqa Insights, we'll look at what changes when that constraint disappears.