Should you put your prices on your website?

Pricing on websites — yes or no?

“Should I put my prices on my website?” I get asked this question all the time. In a services business, it’s not a yes/no question. Whether you should put your prices on your website depends on:

• Your industry
• Your competitors
• Your business goals

The reality is that there is no “should” about whether your website should have prices. The answer for you will come from weighing up a number of considerations discussed below.

These are the things you should think about to decide whether you should put prices on your site or not.

What to think about when deciding whether your prices should be on your website?

1. Is your price comparable to your competitors’ prices?

If you charge more (or less) than your competitors, you need to communicate the reasons for the difference. That might be better done in person.

And if your prices are much higher you definitely need website copywriting that supports that. You’re not going to sell an Armani jacket on a Kmart website. (And if you’re not sure what exactly your website is doing, we review websites.)

2. Is everyone else publishing their prices?

If everyone else publishes their prices on their website, you could lose out if you don’t publish your prices. If a potential client gets enough pricing information from cruising your competitors’ websites, it’s less likely that potential client would jump through extra hoops to get that information from you. They’ll be taking the negotiation to the next stage with your competitors.

If someone gets enough pricing information from cruising your competitors’websites, they’re probably not going to jump through some extra hoops to get that information from you. They’ll take the negotiation to the next stage with your competitors.

3. Do you need some Google love?

Could you do with more visitors finding your website through Google? If SEO is a marketing tactic for you, putting your prices on your website could help with your search engine optimisation.

For example, Taleist has offered business book ghostwriting. Business book ghostwriting is something people search for, and the same people also search terms like “how much is a ghostwriter”? If we were to publish ghostwriting fees on our website, we would become an answer to that question. As an answer to the question of pricing for ghostwriters, we have a good chance that people will send potential clients our way. By the same token, if we didn’t publish our prices, we wouldn’t get those visitors.

Looked at this way, putting prices on your website becomes part of your content marketing and your SEO plan. (More here about learning content writing.)

4. How do you feel about tyre kickers?

Maybe you charge a premium and you’re sick of wasting time fielding enquiries from people who won’t pay what you’re worth. In that case, you might as well filter them out by letting them know your prices. If you charge more than the average bear (and you’re worth it), you don’t need to waste time talking to people without the budget or any interest in spending it on you.

Not so fast, though. The other side of the coin is that your prices might put people off until they understand the value of what you offer. And it might take a call to convey that value. If that’s the case, you don’t want the prices on your website to do all the talking.

5. What is your pricing worth?

If pricing information in your industry is scarce, people might be willing to “pay” for it by giving you their email address. This would be a lead magnet. Giving people a lead magnet (your prices) in exchange for their email address means:

• You know who they are
• You can follow them up

That follow-up doesn’t even have to be manual. You can put everyone who downloads your lead magnet into a marketing automation sequence.

If you do decide to put your prices on your website…

If you decide to put your prices on your website and you’re not the cheapest, your website copywriting needs to work hard to prove your value. You need testimonials, case studies, data…

Do you know what your price is?

This question came up recently and was a new one for me. The client is launching a test version of its product. It has no idea yet what the market will pay, so it hasn’t set the price. Right now, it just wants users.

Should the client have a pricing page or not?

Now, this case is different from the others because there’s no way to actually put the price on the website because no one knows what it is. However, the client could still have a pricing page. It wouldn’t be a very useful page, as it would necessarily have nothing more than “contact us for pricing”.

Technically, that’s a pricing page; it just doesn’t have an actual price on it. My view is that it would be deceptive to have a page labelled “pricing” in the menu when you have no intention (because you can’t) of fulfilling the implicit promise of that page.

Need help deciding what else to put on your website?

At Taleist we write websites that convert. That means our clients get clicks, downloads, calls and sales through their website. If that’s what you’re looking for, please contact us.

Transcript of the video Should I put my prices on my website?

Should you put your price on your website? It’s a great question. It’s one that applies mostly to services businesses. In product businesses, you would probably expect to see a price on a website. When it comes to services, there’s a lot of debate as to whether you should put a price on the website, or not. There are a number of things you need to consider.

Firstly, is your price comparable to your competitors? Somebody who arrives on your website and sees your price, might well have spoken to, or seen the websites of other people in your industry. If you’re a lot cheaper, or a lot more expensive, that’s something you’re going to have to explain, and it’s something that your website is going to have to support.

If you’re more expensive than your competitors, then your website has to look higher quality and more premium than your competitors. Your copy has to explain that away.

If that’s something that you’re worried that your website doesn’t do, or you can’t do in the copyrighting, you maybe be better of holding back and waiting, until you have an opportunity to talk to somebody, so that they can get a feel for you, and you can talk to them about why your price is different from your competitors.

The second thing to look at is, of course, whether all of your competitors are listing their prices on their website. If they are, and you don’t, that could knock you out of the running. When somebody goes online to do their research, they find a few people in your industry.

They look at the prices. They come to your website. You don’t have your price on. Maybe they’re not even going to bother to call or email you, unless they’re so impressed by your website, or they’ve been referred to you, or they’ve had some other sort of recommendation of you. You could knock yourself out of consideration, if you’re not providing the information that everybody else is providing.

The third consideration, regardless of whether everybody else is putting their prices up online, is whether you could use a bit more traffic from Google. In my experience, for instance, I offer a ghostwriting service. A lot of the traffic to that service comes from people asking, “What does a ghostwriter cost?”

Because I’ve got some information about my fees on the website, I attract traffic. On the whole, ghostwriters don’t talk about their fees online.

If you’re in a business where people don’t put their fees up online, you could win the war for getting traffic from Google by providing a good answer for Google searches, to that question of, “How much should somebody in this industry cost?”

Another consideration is whether you get a lot of tire kickers. Going back to my ghostwriting example, I found that I got a lot of people making inquiries in the early days, who couldn’t afford somebody to help them to write a book.

One of the biggest reasons, therefore, that I put my prices online, was so that people could come online, they can see how much ghostwriting a book cost, and they won’t go and bother to get in touch with me, if that wasn’t in line with their budget. I got a lot fewer inquiries, but the inquiries I got were of a higher quality.

If you find yourself getting a lot of tire kickers who just don’t have the budget or the interest in paying what you’re charging, you could find it a really good idea to exclude them and that hurdle, by putting up your fee.

On the other hand, you might be in a business where people think they don’t have the budget for that, but they don’t understand all that you do and the value that you bring. You may, therefore, want that opportunity when they make the inquiry, to have a chance to talk to them, and say, “This is what it costs, but this is why it costs that much. This is what you’re getting.”

Another idea is to give people the price, but to, if you like, charge for it. Again, with the ghostwriting example, I have a page about the fees. But if you actually want to know what the fees are, you have to give me your email address. In return for that email address, you automatically get sent a PDF with the discussion of ghostwriting fees, and why they are what they are.

I’ve got your email address. I can do some marketing to you if I want to, and you get a valuable piece of information you can’t get from a lot of ghostwriter’s sites. Again, you might find that’s a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and also, to give you a way of gathering email addresses from perspective clients, so that you can do some marketing to them.

There are other considerations when it comes to putting your price up on your website. These are just a few of them, but they give you some sort of idea of the fact it’s not a yes or no question. It’s to do with your industry, your business strategy, and what you stand to gain by putting the price up, versus what you might lose by putting the price up.

When you start to run the question through those sort of filters, I think you’ll be able to come up with an answer for yourself.