Should I Publish My Prices On My Website? - Get Articles by Tanja Rosteck |  |
> Get Articles > Pricing and Supply and Demand > Should I Publish My Prices On My Website? Should I Publish My Prices On My Website? Download as PDFTanja Rosteck tanjawords4nerds.com Words4Nerds http://www.words4nerds.com Should I Publish My Prices On My Website? It's a question every small business owner has thought about: should I publish my prices on my website? The decision can be complicated, especially if your business offers consulting, creative or customized services. If you don't offer pricing information on your site, customers may immediately assume they can't afford you; but if you do publish your prices, clients may be quickly scared off by the numbers. How can you strike this delicate balance? Here's some points to consider when making this important decision. I charge by the hour. Should I publish my hourly rates? This depends on the type of services you offer. If you provide an easily-understood, common consumer service such as house cleaning or dog walking, it's preferred to state your prices upfront on your website. People are used to comparison-shopping for these types of services and already have a pretty good idea of what's involved. If you don't state your price, they may automatically think you're too expensive... and they'll simply click over to your competitors' sites. However, creative services such as graphic design or custom programming are not readily understood by the average customer. They will probably not understand what you can produce in an hour, or how many hours their project will take. And they may even be scared off by what they perceive as an expensive rate, without fully understanding what the price includes or the amount of work involved. The best solution is to... State a price range, with a disclaimer. This allows you to give potential customers some idea of your prices, while still allowing you to remain flexible on the final cost. For instance, state that a specific type of project typically costs between $X and $X, with a disclaimer that each client's needs are unique and you would be happy to provide a custom quote for any project. (And make sure you tell them exactly how to get in contact with you and what information you'll need to provide a quote!) I'm a solution provider - I offer a combination of services. A solution provider generally consults with a client to understand their specific needs, then provides the appropriate service(s) to meet those needs. For instance, a documentation solution provider may offer technical writing as well as translation, graphic design and printing services, in order to produce a complete user manual for the client. In a situation like this, publishing the individual service costs and all the possible pricing combinations on your website would be a nightmare - especially if some of those services are sub-contracted to other companies. Clients use solution providers precisely because they often don't understand all the details involved in producing a product, so they may not even know which individual services they need. Instead, the web designer could advertise, "Complete business websites starting from $X!" with a brief listing of what the typical business website would include. How do I handle price increases? In this case, publishing your rates online may actually work to your advantage. You can post a notice well in advance stating that your rates will be changing, by how much, and when the new prices will take effect. You can even boost sales with this type of notice - "Our prices go up on September 31, so stock up now while rates are low!" Once published, consider your prices "cast in stone". Once you publish your prices online, you're committed to them. That means you cannot charge the notoriously-difficult client a few bucks more per hour, or build in a contingency fee for a job you anticipate delays on. Explaining such additional costs will be difficult and certainly won't create customer confidence in your business. "Your website says $65, so why are you charging me $75?" Whether you publish your service prices on your website or not, it's important to focus on the value you're bringing to the customer. There will always be bargain-hunters out there, but if your website has fully informed visitors of the key competitive advantages of your services and what's involved in providing them, you should not encounter much resistance about your prices - whether they're published online or not. Copyright 2001 Tanja Rosteck How useful did you find this article? This article can be downloaded freely from http://www.get-articles.com and used on your website or in your ezine so long as the author is credited and their resource box left intact. You should not change any links in the article, and where the article is used on a website it's links should be clickable. Please see our terms and conditions page for more information: http://www.get-articles.com/authors-publishers-terms.php |
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