On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I wanted to talk about pricing and the age-old question about whether you should be really upfront with your prices on your website (unless, of course, you’re running an e-commerce website where you can’t really get away with it).
It’s a discussion I got involved with today and there’s a couple of different schools of thought from it. Obviously, the big issue is that if you put your prices online, then firstly, your competitors will know exactly how much you charge and will be able to, should they wish, undercut you when they’re talking to their potential clients. Secondly, you’ve got the issue that your customers could see that price and be put off by it because they think you’re too expensive and they don’t get to understand the value that you give.
There’s a couple of issues around this. I’ve mentioned on this podcast before when I was the web designer for Game back in the early 2000s, we were the biggest retailer of video games on day of release, I think Game had something like a third of the market share of games when they came out on day of release. Game’s main competitors for video games were supermarkets, large chain stores like Sainsbury’s and Tesco. They used to advertise on their website that they were the cheapest place for video games, so they were the cheapest place you could get them online for the main game that was out that week. What we would do is that we would knock the price down of a main title by a penny under theirs, and then phone them up and say ‘yeah, I’ve seen on your website that you’ve got this down here, you’re not actually, we are’. That’s an extreme example.
There’s the other issue that if you don’t transact online, so if people don’t come to your website and actually put their credit card details and pay, should you be putting your prices online? There’s a few things to consider here. Firstly, if you’re telling people your prices, don’t necessarily worry that you’re putting people off. If somebody is likely to be won and lost on price, then they’re not the kind of customer that you want in the first place. If you want something cheaper than this, then go somewhere else, this isn’t us. Anybody that says to you ‘oh come on, do it cheaper’, then they’re not the kind of client you want in the first place.
So, I think the answer to this question is, I’m afraid, the old adage in the search engine optimization industry: it depends.
It depends. It depends on what your service is, what your competitors are doing, where you rank in terms of cost related to your competitors and who your target client is and whether your target client is driven by price. It depends how comfortable and confident you are with your pricing model, as well. It is very much a case-by-case basis. For example, with Engage Web, we don’t have our prices on our website, we don’t have our prices for search engine optimization, for email marketing, for pay-per-click, for meta ads, or whatever that may be. We don’t have the prices for web design – the only thing we do have the price for is for our Fresh Start websites. We have that clearly listed on the website at £99 +VAT per month because that is very much a price-driven model. That is the champion website design, the top website design from our best web designers with no upfront cost, no setup fee, for just £99+VAT per month on a minimum two-year contract.
But that doesn’t work for everyone. It depends. You’ve got to ask yourself how comfortable you are with putting the prices on the website. How comfortable are you with justifying the prices? How comfortable are you with someone coming to you and saying can I have it for cheaper? How comfortable are you with the notion that your competitors could offer a like-for-like service at a cheaper price?
Thank you very much for listening. I appreciate you staying with me throughout the duration of this rant. If you could give me a subscribe, give me a follow on whatever platform you happen to be listening to this on and give me a rating, that would be much appreciated. I will catch you on the next podcast, thank you.