"Should I put price tags on my products?"
That is the question.
Ok, I'll stop with the cheesiness. (probably not) I'm so grateful for my online communities where I get to see what the hot topics and debates are and this is definitely one of them.
For those that don't put price tags on items the most common reason why is because they want to be asked by the customer and they want to engage with the customer.
While I think that's a good reason I don't think pricing should be the way to get there.
I love the goal of wanting customers to engage in conversation so you can chat about your products but I would challenge you to find a more organic and natural way to do that. We've all experienced some sort of hard sales from businesses and I don't think anyone is a fan of that. (I'm sure there's someone out there that loves to experience hard sales but I personally haven't met any) Whether it's the mall kiosk chasing you with a lotion bottle, the time share promising a free 3 day Mexican cruise, or the mlm'er online promising to give you more info in your dm's, most no one likes the dangling carrot - or better known today as click bait. It cheapens a business because we associate it with sleazy sales. Before the internet it was the used car salesman.
And on the flip side of that coin I've heard the argument that it's more like the high end art gallery with the "price available upon request" argument of luxury art, homes sales, etc, or even lobster on the menu. But what do we associate that with? Probably being too expensive.
Regardless, it doesn't land a customer where we want psychologically. At a craft fair we have seconds to capture a customer's attention and it doesn't take much for them to move to the next booth. Instead of giving them a reason to move on we should do the opposite. My next blog post is actually going to be on creative and organic ways to draw the customer in to your booth so I'll save a lot of this for that post. Essentially, we don't want to trick people into a conversation, we should want them to want to talk to us, not feel compelled to out of necessity.
I read a recent statistic recently that 68% of people don't like talking to "sales people". Personally, I feel that statistic is rather low and wondered what exactly they were defining as a sales person but I don't think we need statistics to realize people don't like to be sold and if they have to ask you for the price of something they are most likely expecting it's because they are about to be sold.
"I don't want them to decide on my product without having a chance to talk with me first, at least this way I can have a conversation with them and keep them engaged."
But not putting a price on there almost guarantees that that will happen.
We live in a world today where people barely have time to breathe and we live in a world today where people don't trust anyone anymore.
We have to break through those barriers by creating an environment our customer feels safe in. By putting a price on your product you're saying, "I'm confident with my pricing and product enough to put it out there and trust that you'll talk to me about it if you choose to."
As business owners we need to give to get. Give the customer what they want. They want to know how much things cost without having to ask for it. I know that I personally will hire a company that puts their pricing readily available on their website instead of one that provides a quote. Because in my mind I'm wondering if I'm providing information that that's making my quote unnecessarily more expensive than it needs to be. And a customer is going to wonder, "Why isn't the price available? Is it so they can change it when they want? Maybe it's more expensive at this event than others?"
Transparency will win you more customers than you will lose