LevelUp's mobile payments service lets users scan a smartphone barcode rather than swipe a credit card. Will consumers embrace the service? Will merchants? LevelUp considers adjustments to make the service attractive to both consumers and merchants, while trying to accelerate deployment at reasonable cost.

OpenTable considers adjustments to increase its benefits to merchants, including a novel payments service that lets customers skip the multi-step process of using a credit card.

ShopRunner considers adjustments to improve its online shopping service which offers no-charge two-day shipping as well as easy returns and other conveniences. Competitors' diverse pricing models and ancillary benefits raise questions about how to structure and price ShopRunner's offering. Meanwhile, an investment from Alibaba presents new opportunities in China but risks distraction from the core business.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How can companies design products and product lines to maximize profits? Out of all the potential configurations available to them, how should they decide which ones to offer? The authors have developed a framework for balancing the costs of developing and offering a rich line of products and services against customer demand for additional choice. Their methodology helps managers make informed decisions about which features to include in the product; which variations to include in a product line; and how the offerings should evolve with technology and competition. Using examples from the music, software, and media industries, and citing companies including Apple, Dell, Microsoft, The New York Times, and ESPN, the authors describe five basic types of product offerings: the a la carte offering, the specialization offering, the all-in-one offering, the basic/premium offering, and the have-it-your-way offering. By highlighting how costs influence product design, they depart from the standard product-success metrics, such as revenue and market share, which are the main focus of most of the work on product bundling. The authors note that the decision to offer a product and how it is designed generally affects both the fixed costs and the marginal costs. They argue that product architects need to expand their definition of fixed and marginal costs beyond those that they typically track and account for to cover costs across the entire supply chain. Although some of these costs may be hard to quantify, they are often too significant to ignore.