Hiding your prices makes your business look sneaky. Here's the facts.

If your website says price on application, you are losing clients, not maybe losing clients, you absolutely are losing clients. And the worst part of this is that because you're not putting pricing on your website, you probably think you are being clever. Well, you're not. If you don't know who I am by now, I'm Craig and I run a design agency called Genius Division. We've designed and built hundreds, if not thousands of worldclass websites by this point.

And this mistake in this video, not putting pricing on your website, is easily the most common mistake I see people make. People are absolutely terrified, and I don't know why, of putting prices on their website and putting them online. Absolutely scared, shitless. But why? I hear this constantly.

I tell someone, you need to put pricing on your website. And they say, I don't want to scare people off. I'd rather explain the value first. Every project is different, but this one is easily my favorite. I don't want competitors seeing my prices, and that's all fine and that's all cool, but if you don't do it, let's talk about what's actually happening when you don't put pricing on your website.

Because the thing that is actually happening is probably not the thing that you think. Imagine this. You land on a website. You like the design and you like the tone of the website and you're thinking, "Yeah, this looks like the kind of company I would probably want to work with." Now, your brain is asking one question. Can I afford this?

That's it. It's no more complicated than that. Can I afford this? It's not what is their origin story, and it's definitely not how many awards have they won. It's just can I afford this?

So, you scroll up and down the website and you don't find any numbers. You scroll a little bit more and you still don't find any numbers. You can't find how much this service costs. Now, your brain starts to fill the gap. And what does it usually fill it with?

It's too expensive. And you leave the website, you click off, you don't call them, there's no inquiry, and you are gone forever clicking on the next website in Google attempting to find a service that you like with pricing on the website. People generally don't want a 45 minute discovery call. They don't want a proposal. They don't want let's jump on a Zoom and explore whether we'd like to work together.

They just want to find out if they can afford something. They just want a ballpark. They just want a number, something solid so they can figure out whether they can afford your service or not. Let's compare two realities here. Hang on.

These are the two realities. Apparently, it's all I had to hand. Reality one, your website says projects start from £5,000. Somebody sees it and they think, "Yeah, that's in my budget." End of buying decision. Reality two, they have to book a call.

You prep for the call. You move things around in your calendar. You do a 1-hour Zoom call with them. You write a proposal. You wait 3 days.

Then the email lands in your inbox. Thanks, but this project is outside of our budget. Brilliant. That's hours of your life gone. Multiply that by 10 inquiries every single month.

And that's not a strategy. That's just an inefficient sales machine. And that's not what we're trying to do with your website, especially when it comes to pricing. So, here's what's really happening here. When you've hidden the price, you create uncertainty in a potential customer.

That potential customer hates to feel uncertain because uncertain makes it feel like a risky purchase. I mean, they don't even know the price at this point. Risk makes people hesitate and then hesitation will kill the conversion because they won't get in touch with you and it'll never go any further. Someone may turn from a warm lead who comes to your website but can't find the pricing into a cold one because they don't know how much the service costs. and you think you are protecting yourself by not showing the pricing on your website.

You're just making it harder for a potential person to purchase your service and nobody is going to thank you for that. You're certainly not going to win an award for it. Every industry has tiers, cheap, mid, premium, and your service or your business is going to be in one of those tiers, whether you like to admit that or not. And price is the fastest way to communicate which tier you're actually in. You can write luxury all over your website all you want, but without a number on there, it means nout.

And you can say affordable as much as you want, but if there's not a price on there, it means nout. You're affordable compared to what? A Ferrari or a Fredo. By the way, a Fredo is a cheap piece of chocolate in England that isn't a very nice piece of chocolate. If you're in America, compare it to a Hershey's, something like that.

The point is that numbers create context. Context builds trust. It tells somebody where in the tier that you sit. If your service costs £20,000, say it. Because the right people wanting to purchase your service won't be scared by that price.

The wrong people will be scared by that price. And that's good because we don't want to attract the wrong people. Remember back when I was talking about selling and repelling? That's what the website should do. You want to sell to the right people, but repel the other ones.

You're not trying to attract every Tom, Dick, and Harry to your website. You only want to attract the Tom and not the dick. And yes, I can hear the objection from the other side of the screen here. Every project is different. Yes, obviously every project is different.

You're not selling a tin of beans, unless you are, I suppose. But even when every project is different, you can still say projects typically start from X amount of pounds. Or most clients invest between X and Y amount of pounds. Or the one that I like is a typical project when you're working with us costs, let's say, £8,000. You're not engraving that price in stone by saying something like that, but you're orienting a potential client towards how much you may charge them.

people, potential customers are not needing precision here. They're just looking for a bit of direction about potentially how much something might cost. So then they can actually go to a boss and actually say, "Okay, we're looking at this new project and it's looking like it's going to be within the region of £8,000 to £15,000. Can we afford that? Is that within our budget?" If I have to go back to my boss and say, "I really want to work with this company, but I have to have a two-hour meeting with a sales team before I can even find the price out." It's gone already, and you ain't going to get that sale.

Let's be honest and a little bit uncomfortable here, though. Sometimes people are hiding the pricing because they're not confident in the pricing that they're charging. They're testing the price. They're unsure. They've never actually sold the product for the price that they want to sell it at.

They're worried that they're going to be too expensive. So, they avoid putting the number on the website entirely because in truth, the number is entirely movable. It isn't a real number. And that is a real issue because if you don't show your pricing on your website, it isn't showing confidence because confidence on your website is communicated through clarity. If you have a very clear website that says what you do, how you do it, how much it costs, you are building confidence with a potential customer, there is nothing that states confidence more than showing this is how much it costs and here's where you go to buy it.

If you stand behind your pricing on your website publicly and openly, people feel that. And if you dance around the price, they feel that, too. It doesn't exactly scream authority or an industry leader. If you don't put the pricing on your website of how much the service costs when you add pricing to your website, you will get fewer inquiries. But that's a good thing.

You don't want everybody and their dog inquiring with your business. You want qualified people who already know the ballpark of the product. You want people who aren't going to faint when they see the proposal. You want to have already qualified the buyer. The fewer people you get, the better.

That's the tradeoff here. You don't want millions of people getting in touch with you to have to write proposals. You want less people getting in touch with you who know your price to get started on a project. And as I always say at this point as well, your website is not an art project. Is not there to look pretty.

It is a sales machine. The website is not there to protect your ego. It really has kind of four primary purposes. What do you do? How do you do it?

How much does it cost? And what happens next? One clear, confident call to action to achieve it. If you miss any of those, you make buying from your website harder than it needs to be. None of those four things are hard to sort.

Pricing is one of the easiest ones to sort, but most people hide it. I'm encouraging you to stop hiding your pricing and put your prices on your website. So, go do it. You know, it's an easy win and you'll get more sales. What else can I say really?

I mean, come on. And if this video made you slightly uncomfortable, good. Next, you can go and fix the headline on your website. And you can do that by watching this video right here. Go on then.