Should you publish the prices of your product or service on a website

I came across a post on the ecademy website, from a practitioner of NLP on whether she should post the prices of her services online. But this is a general and important question, and needs to be answered on a case by case basis. The more commoditized your product or service is, the more reasonable it seems to publish prices. My opinion is that publishing prices is not right, and pricing need to be based on the value that your product or service provides them. To give you a quick and dirty look at how you could go about such a decision:

The steps to effective pricing are

• to quantify the value of your service - as seen by the customer
• to set up a process whereby you can demonstrate this value to your clients
• to motivate your sales channels to recognise this price in final achieved price.

The crucial issue you have to tackle first is - what is the value of your service as seen in euros? (or whatever form of currency you use) To answer this question,

• Ask yourself if you have a homogeneous customer base?. If there are differences in the customer base as regards how they buy, and how important your service is to them - you need to set up different prices for each of those groups.
• Look at your track record of previous sales to see if some customers are willing to pay more for your product than others.

If any of the answers to the above questions are yes, please don't publish prices! Your customers are obviously motivated to buy, not just by price but also by other significant issues.

If of course both answers are no; you could go out and publish prices. The moment you publish your price, that price becomes a list price, and customers will start negotiating for price discounts from that price. More importantly, you need to start innovating in your service to see if you can find other reasons to increase the price you have set.

Once you have found these reasons and add-on capabilities to your service, create a split level price, where you drop your original price of the basic service package a little bit, and publish a new price as well, which is slightly above the original price.

I hope this helped a little bit. I have a more comprehensive document on Optimal pricing on my website that you could look at.