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Should you do it or shouldn’t you? Are you going to lose possible customers if you include your fees on your site? Is it really that important? Jakob Nielsen lists not publishing prices as one of the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design for 2007.
The argument for not publishing the rate is rather simple. Andy Beal argued against publishing rates on a website because:
Visitors WILL shop on price and not value
Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world where budget is not an issue, where everyone has unlimited supply of cash, and customers choose to shop for value and ignore price. It is a fact of life that some customers simply will not afford to pay for a certain level of services. But let me rewind a little here. In my opinion any discussion about value should not exclude price. Why? Because price can have a great impact on the value perceived from a product or a service. It is not the only element that impacts value but it is definitely one of the major elements. For example, I would love to hire Andy Hagans for linkbaiting services, http://www.andyhagans.com/link-baiting.php I believe that his services are valuable and can help us a lot. But the reality is he is too expensive for us at this point. It is not that Andy’s service are not valuable, it is just that given his rates, we choose to go with someone else. Price matters to clients in two different ways:
- When evaluating different services, price compared to ROI will play a major role in selecting one service versus another
- When perceived value from different services or companies appears the same, then price matters.
Customers will see value in your propositions if you provide them with one regardless to whether you mention your price or not.
You’ll miss out on small clients and large clients.
In Andy’s opinion small clients will be turned away from high rates, and large clients will laugh at small rates. But my question is what about your marketing vision and goals? Should a business be targeting both small and large firms? One of the first things you do when creating a marketing plan is to assess the segment of market you are going to target. What revenue do they make, how much do they budget for your service and how large they are. Of course if you are a big company such as Microsoft or IBM, you can afford to target different sizes of business. If you are not that large, you are better off focusing on certain size of companies.
Pricing doesn’t have to be set in stone.
Of course it does not. But what you need to do is to have a starting point. Staffing any project costs us around $1,500 to start with. Based on that we know that there is a minimum we charge per project. So, when publishing prices, we do not provide exact amounts but we do provide a minimum per project.
Rand from SEOMOZ moved beyond the discussion around publishing or not publishing the rates. He regularly posts standard rates for SEO services in his blog. Update: John Andrews had a different and an interesting perspective on the rates Rand outlined for SEO services.
To me, publishing fees online is a matter of usability for a website. The purpose of the site is to help a visitor convert to a client. To do so, every page and element on your site must be developed with the client in mind. If the client has a question, answer it.
If you are going to publish your prices, do it the right way:
That is the top mistake that many B2B service web sites fall in when publishing their fees. They include a single pricing page on their site to cover all the services they offer. The result usually is that page will be the most visited page on the site and average pages visited will drop. And the company or person ends up pulling the rates off the site. So instead include the rates for each service in that particular service page itself. That way, the client will have all their questions answered when they view a service page. The client will get to learn about your services, have their questions answered as well as know how much that particular service costs.
So although I concur with some of Andy’s points, I don’t think that they are reasons that would lead me to start encouraging clients to remove prices from the site. What do you think?
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