Should you should put prices on your website?

There are many valid reasons why as a business you do not want to publish your prices on your website. But, ask yourself, do your prospective customers want to see them? Unless you are selling to a market that doesn’t care about price, then the answer is likely to be yes.

If prices on your website mean the difference between a prospect choosing you over the competition, why wouldn’t you publish them?

Let’s look at a few reasons businesses have against publishing prices:

My prices don’t reflect the value and excellent service I give to my customers?

If your customer service, and whole experience of buying from you, is second-to-none and you’re concerned that showing your prices doesn’t get this information across, your website has more work to do. A prospective customer should be able to get an indication of the type of supplier you are, and the quality service they will experience in buying from you, from browsing your website.

My competitors will see my prices

Yes, they will. But you should already know where you are in terms of pricing in your sector, as will your competitors, and if your website is doing the job of selling your service and values, then you’ve nothing to worry about.

If your worried about a ‘cheap’ competitor seeing your prices and deciding to match yours, the value that you offer in service and experience should shine through and will work in your favour.

I want prospective customers to contact us for a price

Even if it means you’ll potentially lose them because they don’t want to spend time on a conversation or an email?

They’ll speak to your great sales team eventually, but if they’re just browsing and weighing up all the possibilities, an indication of a price, without them having to do any work would work very well for you.

It really depends on your sector, but increasingly, customers expect to research online and self-service as much as possible. How can they do this if they can’t see prices, or at least, a price guide?

If you can’t be price-specific, how about a price guide?

If yours is the type of product or service that requires more detail of requirements and an assessment of need before you can commit to a price, why not consider a price guide? Or ‘scenario’ pricing.

Kitchen companies will often show an illustration of a kitchen and give a guide price, with the small print indicating it’s a guide only. This will at least give your browsers something to go on and stop you being in the bracket of ‘too expensive to publish your prices’.

What impression are you giving, with a website with no prices?

Ever walked into a jeweller’s shop with no prices on anything and feel that you can’t ask because if you have to ask the price, you probably can’t afford it?

Particularly if you have a really impressive website with a big company feel, glossy photos and high-impact marketing, you may be giving the impression to browsers that you are too expensive for them.

It used to be considered somehow low or tacky to have prices on a website, or in a brochure. But nowadays we know this is information browsers want, along with a whole range of other factors to enable browsers in their decision of who to buy from.

And if price-visibility matters to your prospects, it should matter to you. Making browsers work hard to get price information only increases the chances of them going elsewhere.

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