0 Show me the money!

Author: Piers Parker
5th December, 2006

Like some sort of e-commerce water torture, store owners who hide the product price on their online store have been slowly driving me mad. It has even translated to shopping on the high street, now if there is no clear price tag I am not interested. After all, if it doesn’t have a price tag on it, it might not be for sale!

When you look to buy something, there are 2 top levels decisions that are made very early on:

1. What I want to buy - “The Item”
(e.g. a second-hand car or e-commerce software)

2. How much I am prepared to spend - “The Budget”
(e.g. around £1000)

Armed with these two pieces of information the number of options is dramatically reduced, making it easier to choose the item you want to purchase from all the products available in the world.

Real World Exmaple
I will use a recent task to find a cheap car to illustrate the point – but I hear you cry “what has that got to do with displaying the price on an e-commerce website?”. I will explain.

You may have noticed many people who are trying to sell their car privately will place an A4 sheet of paper with the cars details in the window. Great, now if I see a car with an A4 sheet in the window I can make the assumption that it is ‘For Sale’ before I even get close enough to read what is on the paper. Those big bold words ‘FOR SALE’ would have been better substituted with the price. Having a big bold price would have told me quickly if the car was in my budget, if it is not I move on to the next one without wasting any time, if it is in my budget I can take the time to check if it has the ‘features’ I need.

Discussion
So, why do sellers think that the price is so un-important? Maybe they think their product is a little on the expensive side and want to sell the products features before hitting you with the price. This argument I really cannot understand it, I don’t know about you but when I’m looking to buy something it is very rare - in fact it has never been the case - that ‘money is no object’. So, showing me the price should be one of the sellers primary objective - to quote Jerry Maguire “Show me the money!” There would be little point spending time reading about the products features if when I finally get to see the price, I can’t afford it - what a waste of time.

What other reasons would there be to not show the price?
If you sell services there may be an argument for not displaying prices. Requirements and specifications would need to be gathered by the salesperson before a quote could be supplied. Even in this situation I would recommend giving a set of ‘guide’ prices, for example “Prices range from £500 up to £5000″. If you sell something that people will ‘price shop’ for (e.g. a car or an iPod), then it would be harmful not to display the price. They may assume it was too expensive or the seller didn’t know the true value.

Our product, EROL e-commerce software, for example could be said to sit somewhere between a Product and a Service as it is a quantifiable, statically priced product, however nobody will ‘price shop’ for EROL itself. However, people will almost certainly ‘price shop’ for e-commerce software. We are back to our 2 top-level decisions again: Item and Budget.

Unless you are a total market leader with a killer product, the rule of thumb is to never throw hurdles in front of customers. Making them phone or hunt around the website for a price is definitely a hurdle.

Summary
Try to ensure that you display the price of the product where-ever the name of the product is displayed, so browsing customers can quickly check that the product meets their ‘Item’ and the ‘Budget’ requirements. Most online stores offer a thumbnail and expanded view for each product, so make sure the price is clearly displayed on both these views. Another consideration is for products that have a lot of information in their expanded view, putting the price at the bottom of this information would cause the browsing customer to ‘hunt’ for the price, so try to ensure the price is display in a consitant position ‘above-the-fold’ (if something on a web page is ‘above-the-folder’ it means you do not need to scroll down the page to see it). Always remember, don’t make people hunt for the price, it should be right there, next to the product name: Item & Budget.

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