Pricing on websites – why keep it secret?

August 22, 2010 9:51 pm admin Website Strategy

One of my contacts, knowing what a geek I am for analysing website statistics, brought to my attention www.visistat.com.   The first thing I did when I went to that website was look at the Pricing page (after all, no point in looking further if it’s way beyond client budgets).  That page (http://www.visistat.com/vs8-pricing.php) refers to B2C and B2B pricing and in both cases there are options to either ‘Free Trial’ or ‘Learn More’.   Both options disappointed me.

I could have a free 7 day trial of the system if I wanted to – no strings attached.  Sounds a reasonable offer but why would I have a trial of something that may be prohibitively expensive?  I could get  to the end of the 7 days and think the system is wonderful but if it was too expensive for my clients then it would still be a no-go.

So my answer to the 7 day trial is: “Tell me what it’ll cost and I may consider a trial”.

The other option was to ‘Learn More’, which took me off to look at various features of the system.  That was OK except that they sped through quickly and had no option to pause the onslaught of information to absorb.

So my answer to ‘Learn More’ is: “If you want me to get a good feel for the system then let me review the features at my own pace.”

Although the focus here is on VisiStat, the main problem is all too common in other websites – the hiding of pricing.

Do website owners in 2010 really think that people will find something so tempting that they’ll sign up for a trial, or will part with their contact details, just to find out a bit more?   Is there some sort of unwritten marketing rule that says that it’s good to be mysterious with pricing?   It’s fair enough to say that some people will judge on price immediately and so there’s some mileage in hiding the price and letting the product offering shine on its own merits.   But I think the majority would rather see the price of what’s on offer.

On the Custwin website the pricing of services is very clear.  If people don’t have those budgets then fair enough.  Perhaps VisiStat should consider this because their product may be brilliant but many of those in a position to potentially buy it won’t go down the path they want us to.    It may cost $10, $20, $50, $100, $500 a month.   It may be cheaper and provide better features than some of the webstats analysis tools I’m currently using.  But I’ll never find that out – purely because they chose to keep pricing on their website a secret, which didn’t match my expectations from a website that’s supposed to be selling me something.