When you go to Amazon.com all the prices are clearly marked and you can easily decide what you want to buy based on various factors, including the cost. But pricing isn’t always so simple—custom-made products and packages of services are hard to price upfront. Plus, you might have different pricing for the local Israeli market vs. clients outside of Israel, further complicating the pricing structure. Is it best to list prices on the website anyway or to reveal prices only after you are contacted?
Transparency builds trust
People like to know what they’re getting into. No one enjoys writing an email just to find out your service costs more than their rent. Ask your friends if they ever contact a business to ask for pricing—chances are that a lot of them will say they never do. Listing prices makes your business feel legit, trustworthy and confident.
Filter out the wrong customers
If your services start at 1,000 NIS, there’s no need to get inquiries from folks with a 100 NIS budget and a dream. Posting your prices sets expectations and saves everyone time. This is especially true if every inquiry requires a sales call. Scheduling the call, making time for it and the call itself are all time-consuming activities that you only want to embark on if there’s a chance they will result in a sale.
Prices without context
On the other hand, a number on a screen, divorced from any context or explanation, can feel scarier than it should. Without the chance to explain the value, visitors might leave your site before giving you a chance to justify your pricing. They often don’t understand the complexity of the service or the quality of the product you’re offering, which you can properly explain in a phone call.
Flexible pricing
If your services are customizable, listing prices might lock you into numbers that don’t always fit the project. What if someone’s request is wildly simple—or wildly complex? Flat pricing doesn’t always reflect that nuance. The location of your customer may also affect the pricing. If the range of prices in Israel is different from that of other countries, you might want to offer a local price that reflects that. But you don’t want your other customers to know that they are paying more!
The bottom line
The decision whether to list prices on your website is not cut and dried. If your prices are standardized, it’s best to list them for transparency, legitimacy and to help customers make an informed decision. If your pricing changes based on location or project, you can choose to post a range or write “starting at…” to filter out customers that don’t have the budget and to give visitors to your site some idea of what you’re charging. If prices are different for Israeli vs. global clients, you can set up your website to show different prices based on VPN or you can show different prices on the Hebrew site and the English one.
Bottom line, this decision is different for every business, and you might need to test different approaches before settling on the one that works best for your business goals and your potential customers.
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