/ Craig Burgess
Yes. Even if every job's different. Hiding your prices costs you more enquiries than it saves, and here's how to show them when you can't give an exact number.
Yes. Put your prices on your website.
If your website says “price on application”, you’re losing customers. I don’t mean you might be. You are. And the worst bit is that most businesses hiding their prices think they’re being clever.
I’ve been building websites since 2010 and this is the most common mistake I see, by a distance. People are scared stiff of putting a number online. When I tell them to do it, I get the same answers every time:
- “I don’t want to scare people off.”
- “I’d rather explain the value first.”
- “Every project is different.”
- “I don’t want competitors seeing my prices.” (My favourite.)
We’ll get to most of those. First, here’s what’s going on when a customer lands on a website with no prices.
What happens when a customer can’t find your price
Somebody lands on your website. They like the look of it, they like how you talk, and they’re thinking you might be the kind of company they’d work with.
At that point their brain is asking one question. Can I afford this?
They aren’t wondering about your origin story or how many awards you’ve won. So they scroll around looking for a number. They don’t find one. They scroll a bit more.
Then their brain fills the gap, and it nearly always fills it with “too expensive”. They leave. No call, no form, nothing. They’re off to the next result on Google, looking for somebody who’ll just tell them.
Most people don’t want a 45-minute discovery call to find out a price. They don’t want a proposal or a “let’s jump on a Zoom and explore”. They want a ballpark so they can work out if you’re even in the running.
The two ways this can go
Your website says “projects start from £5,000”. Somebody reads it and thinks, yeah, that’s in the budget. Buying decision made (or at least the first one).
Or your website says nothing. They book a call. You prep for it and move your diary around. You do an hour on Zoom, write a proposal, wait three days, and then the email lands: “Thanks, but this is outside our budget.”
That’s hours of your life gone. Do it ten times a month and you’ve built a very slow, very expensive way of finding out people can’t afford you.
“I don’t want to scare people off”
You will get fewer enquiries when you add prices. That’s the point.
You don’t want everybody and their dog getting in touch. You want people who already know roughly what it costs, so nobody faints when the proposal lands. Fewer enquiries, but the ones you get are people who can afford you.
I call it sell and repel. Your website should pull in the right people and put the wrong ones off before they waste an hour of your week. If your service costs £20,000, say so. The right customers won’t be scared by it, and the wrong ones will leave, which is exactly what you want.
Every industry has a cheap end, a middle and a premium end, and you’re in one of them whether you like it or not. A price is the quickest way to tell people which. You can write “luxury” all over your website, but without a number it means nothing. “Affordable” compared to what? A Ferrari? A Freddo?
“Every project is different”
Course it is. You’re not selling tins of beans (unless you are). You can still give people a number to work with:
- “Projects typically start from £X.”
- “Most clients invest between £X and £Y.”
- “A typical project costs around £X.”
You’re not carving that into stone. You’re pointing people in the right direction.
This matters even more when you’re selling to businesses. The person on your website has to go to their boss and say “it looks like it’ll be somewhere between £8,000 and £15,000, can we afford it?” If they have to sit through a sales call before they can even say that, you’ve lost them.
“I don’t want competitors seeing my prices”
Your competitors know your prices already. I’ve worked with businesses in loads of different industries that send people in as secret shoppers to ask for quotes. The only people you’re keeping the number from are the ones who might have bought something.
The uncomfortable one
People hide their prices when they aren’t confident in them. They’re still testing. They’ve never sold at the price they want and they’re worried it’s too much, so the number stays off the website and moves about depending on who’s asking.
Customers pick up on that. Confidence on a website comes from being clear about what you do, how you do it, what it costs and what happens next. Put your price on the website and people can see you’re not embarrassed by it.
How to put your prices on your website
- Add a Pricing page and put it in your main menu. Call it “Pricing” (I’ve seen “Investment” and it makes me wince).
- Show a starting price or a range if every job’s different. Use one of the phrases above.
- Explain what moves the number up or down. It answers the next question before they ask it.
- Put a price near the top of your service pages too, so people don’t have to go hunting.
We do all of this on our own pricing page. Websites start at £5,000 and most of ours land between £8,000 and £12,000. If you want to know how those numbers break down, I wrote about how much a website costs in the UK.
Go and put your prices on your website. It’s one of the easiest wins there is, and if this made you a bit uncomfortable, good.