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Previous: Small Print, Big Consequences By Janet Attard As you might imagine I do a lot of shopping – and purchasing – online. I shop for and buy everything from printer paper and toner to shipping cartons, business books, airline tickets, computers, printers, and packaged software for our office PCs. I also buy ebooks from time to time, and software for the servers that BusinessKnowHow.com and our other sites run on. And that, surprisingly, is where I have the most trouble finding what I need. The difficulty has little to do with the availability of products. Usually there are a number of products for any application I have in mind that will run on our servers. Where the problem arises is with sites that don’t post their pricing on their websites. Now, I know some businesses think that it’s better to hook prospective customers on the benefits of owning their product before they give them the price, but that is not how small businesses (and probably a lot of big businesses) want to buy, or shop, for that matter. When I start researching a product or service I’d like to buy, I go to one or more of the search engines and do a search. I visit a few of the sites I find, and see what their offerings are, how the features stack up and what the pricing is. I’m not looking at this point for the lowest price on what I want to buy. I’m looking for price ranges to see if what I want to buy fits into the budget. When sites don’t list their prices, I have no way of determining whether their product(s) should get put on my short list unless I want to fill out a lead form and waste a salesperson’s time and my time to get information that should have been on the website (i.e., the price.) So, their products don’t get put on my short list. I just forget about them, assuming they’re probably more money than I want to spend. The result is a lose-lose situation. I probably miss out on some products or services that would work well for my business. The manufacturer or service provider is missing out on any purchases I would have made – and any purchases that might have occurred through referrals I might have made. If you would like to reach and sell to small business owners, be sure your pricing is available (and findable) on your website. Don’t make it a mystery. List the different versions of your product or service and the prices for each. You’ll save your sales people time – time they can use to follow up with qualified prospects, instead of chasing useless leads. More: Top 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Web Site Posted by Janet Attard on July 17, 2008 at 5:26 PM | Comments (3)Comments ARRRRRggghh!! I hate it when I can't find the price, or when I have to go through 6 pages of order-form steps to find out the price is absurd, or the shipping is 150% of the item cost, or even worse, they don't ship to my part of the country. YES! If you want to sell on line, right on the homepage list how and where you ship, and on every item page list item cost prominently. You can always ADD the caveat about "Prices subject to change without notice, shipping and handling costs not included. Call for current information." I'm not going to navigate a maze of data entry to become a customer. Would you set up an obstacle course in front of your cash register in your land-based store? Would you fill the shelves in that store with hundreds of items and not put price-tags on them? Hmmm. I didn't think so. Posted by: Chick Todd on July 21, 2008 at 3:41 PM The seller does not show his prices online maybe he does not want his competitors selling the same products to know his prices. He does not want his competitors to undercut him. Posted by: LF NG on July 22, 2008 at 1:28 AM |
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Disclaimer
The information compiled on this site is
Copyright 1999-2008 by Attard Communications, Inc. and by the individual authors. |
While we may lose some sales, we can live with the loss of the sales since we have contract issues of listing pricing on our site. We deal heavily in security check stock that check fraud artists would love to get a hold of because it is so highly prized in the banking community for it's security features and so we don't take an order from anybody. By not having pricing on our site, if someone wants what we offer, they have to contact us. We are required, as part of our contract for selling these high security items, to have a chain of custody in place that shows we've done our homework and researched every company that makes contact with us and determined them to be a valid company. With check fraud running at a $20 Billion Dollar a year clip in the US, every person suffers when check fraud occurs. There are added costs from bank loans, insurance costs and for the company that suffers a check fraud loss, increased pricing to cover their losses. We're proud to be doing our part to reduce check fraud and we'll take the loss of a sale over someone else suffering check fraud because we took an order that would harm someone else after the check fraud artist used our security check stock for harm against another party.
Posted by: Dick Gray on July 21, 2008 at 11:37 AM