Should You Put Prices On Your Web Site?

Whether your web site re­veals your pric­ing or not will make a huge dif­fer­ence in how many in­quiries you get, and what kind of peo­ple will con­tact you.

Most busi­ness own­ers re­ject the idea of pub­lish­ing prices on their web site.

There are two rea­sons for not pub­lish­ing prices I hear most often:

1. I don’t want my com­pe­ti­tion to know my pricing.
2. I might lose cus­tomers who don’t con­tact me be­cause they find my prices too high.

Re­gard­ing #1 my take is that the com­pe­ti­tion can eas­ily find out your pric­ing any­way. It takes five min­utes to email you an in­quiry, and you’ll hap­pily send them back your prices.

Re­gard­ing #2 I un­der­stand the busi­ness owner wants to get in con­tact with the prospect and sell ben­e­fits be­fore re­veal­ing the price. That’s a valid sales strat­egy. I’m sim­ply too lazy to do that. I let my web site do the work. :-)

For my web agency I have been pub­lish­ing my prices since 2003. Here’s why:

1. Pub­lish­ing prices pre-qual­i­­fies your prospects. I found that lots of peo­ple ex­pect to get ser­vices for less than what I’m ask­ing. By pub­lish­ing my prices up­front I don’t have to deal with their in­quiries. It saves me tons of time.

I’m happy if those who ex­pect a cus­tom web site for $ 50.00 don’t even bother to ask me.

2. Show­ing prices on your site builds trust. Imag­ine your prospect is brows­ing your site and sev­eral com­peti­tor web sites. Your site is show­ing prices, but your com­peti­tors make the prospect jump­ing through hoops to get a quote.

It’s most likely that the prospect is more drawn to the site that of­fers all rel­e­vant information.

I buy quite a lot of stuff and ser­vices on­line, but I usu­ally pass of­fers where the ser­vice provider wants me to ‘get in touch with a sales rep.’ The mere fact that they don’t trust me enough to quote their price with­out a sales rep at hand turns me off.

The de­ci­sion is yours.

It won’t make or break your busi­ness, but it’s a con­ve­nient way to fil­ter with how many peo­ple and with who you’ll have to deal personally.