Launching your eCommerce store, whether it’s to sell your own products or to start a dropshipping business, has many moving parts.
Even if we remove the manufacturing, supplier/product factors from the equation, there is still the all-important marketing and sales to take care of.
As new business owners focus on this, with myriad ways to make a website, and the various social platforms and advertising methods to worry about, a lot of small yet important variables fall through the net.
My plan is to start an article series focusing on the details that very often get ignored.
In this first part, we will look at the subject of pricing. Not how to determine the price of your products, but how to display those prices.
There are definitely best practices that you can follow. Whatsmore, these are easy to implement. The resulting lift in conversions can be significant.
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Is Price Placement Really that Important?
Let’s tackle that question first. You may be thinking that the way you display prices on your eCommerce store is irrelevant. As long as they are clear, it doesn’t matter.
This is far from the truth.
Although it seems simple on its face, you really should think about how and where you display product prices.
Doing this right will not only provide a better user experience for your customer, but a combination of psychology and marketing know-how can also turn moderately interested site visitors into customers.
So if you remain interested, let’s dive into how you can do this.
The Best Way to Show Product Prices on your eCommerce store
The following steps are my recommended ways of displaying product prices.
1. Display Product Prices Clearly
Hopefully, you do this anyway. Being clear with your prices is an obvious first step.
However, believe it or not, some entrepreneurs actually keep the price of an item for the very end of the sales content.
The argument is that hiding the price from the customer creates a level of intrigue that helps keep them reading so that they find out more about the product.
In essence, the merchant is giving themselves a longer period of time in which to make the sale.
There may have been some logic to this once, not in 2021 however.
While “gurus” selling lifestyle products and courses often use this technique, (we’ve all seen it – a landing page with 10 minutes of readable content where the exorbitant price is only revealed in the final call to action), a respectable eCommerce store should not do it.
Today’s web users shop online because it is fast and convenient. There are also a lot of choices out there. If you dally around making it difficult for a site visitor to buy a product (by making the price difficult to ascertain), they will simply swipe or click and look elsewhere.
A competitor that has a clean, efficient interface providing all the details the buyer needs upfront, will be there to make the sale.
It is not difficult to make prices clear to the buyer. The following guidelines should help.
- Position the price at the top of the sales content and/or on the product image if possible.
- Position the price beside the product title
- Use a different font and color for the price.
- If you use call-to-action boxes (CTA “Buy Now” for example), include the price inside this too.
The good news is, many eCommerce themes already provide these features. If your store is hosted on the Shopify platform, you can download free themes such as the Debutify theme from the app store, and implement these pricing layouts with just a click of a button.
2. Utilize Discounting and sales and make these standout
Everybody loves a bargain. In fact, it is quite possible to make sales based on the mere fact the customer perceives that they are getting money off the standard price.
The customer believes they are saving money and makes the order feeling satisfied.
The best way to make an impact with this technique is to ensure that discounts are clearly highlighted. These really need to stand out.
Don’t be shy with this. If you are offering reduced prices, your customer needs to know about it. Show the discount text in a bold, eye-catching color.
You can also use the technique of striking a line through the original price and showing the new price in a splash of color, creating urgency and highlighting the savings.
You should also implement ways of calculating to the customer how much they are saving due to the sale items.
This is done by ensuring the shop basket adds up the original prices as well as the sale price and then displays the overall cost saving. Customers (subconsciously) love to see this.
It will draw them further down the sales funnel, making it difficult to say no to the bargain. They may also add more items in order to take advantage of the discounts.
- Related Content: Dropship Software Comparison: Dropified vs Oberlo
3. Make the product prices currency specific
The beauty of selling online is that you can reach customers from all over the world.
While the scope is wide, you could be missing out on sales if your product prices are not country-specific.
A buyer in the UK may well be put off and they reach your website and lists all the prices in dollars.
One way to get around this is to implement ways of changing the currency in line with your customer’s location.
There are a few ways of doing this. One method is to have a universal currency change option at the top of your website.
The customer selects their currency of choice and all prices are changed across the entire site.
However, with the attention span of the average buyer being so short, the chances are they will not even do this. Faced with the wrong currency, they will head to another eCommerce store.
The best way to ensure you display product prices in the correct currency is to install a theme that has built-in trackers that detect where the customer is from.
Before the page is even loaded, the price will be set to the currency of that region.
Not only will your potential customer feel more confident about making a purchase, but they also will not have to concern themselves with currency transfer calculations.
Again, if you are using Shopify, I would recommend the Debutify theme. This has the capability of automatically locating your visitor’s destination and will set product price currency accordingly.
The result is increased conversions for you as well as happier customers.
4. Show Shipping Prices on the Sales Page
Some merchants wait until the basket checkout before they reveal the shipping price of the items to be purchased.
There are two reasons this happens. It is either deliberate, so that the lower amount is shown during the shopping process, or it is because the website doesn’t have the means to show shipping costs until calculated in the basket.
It is a mistake to fall into this trap.
This ensures that the buyer doesn’t get a surprise once they reach the checkout, and decide that the items are not for them after all, due to the higher than anticipated cost.
If, as we have recommended elsewhere, if you are able to provide free shipping, you have to make this clear next to the product price. Shout the deal from the proverbial roof-tops!
You could also use the slash-priced technique and show the normal cost with shipping being charged, alongside the price the customer actually pays due to your free shipping offer.
Bundled item shipping costs (and appropriate savings), should also be highlighted.
5. Price Ranges Can be Shown Too
Price ranging may seem complicated, however, with a quality theme such as Debutify, you can add this to your Shopify site with ease.
So what is price ranging?
Basically, it is where you show what a selection of products may amount to within a range (depending on what is selected).
For example, if a product sales page contains a number of items where the buyer may purchase one or all of the items (e.g a full outfit on a clothing web store), the overall cost will vary in line with what they choose.
In this scenario, you show the full range of the cost (the price of the cheapest item on the lowest end, the price of all of the items at the top end), so that your site visitor knows the full budget of what they are looking at.
This approach increases transparency as well as convenience, both of which your customers will appreciate.
- Related Content: How to Choose The Best Theme for Your eCommerce Store
Final Words
As you can see, there is much more to the way you show your product prices than just slapping them on the sales page.
The various techniques discussed here will increase your conversion rates, so you shouldn’t ignore them.
How you implement them will vary depending on the platform you are using for your eCommerce store. However, as I have recommended throughout, if you are selling on Shopify, do check out the Debutify theme.
It has everything you need straight out of the box, to easily display your product prices in line with the above. The faster you set to work on making these changes, the faster you will see an increase in your sales.
