This question was recently posed on Linkedin as a Q&A and it’s one that the answer can vary massively from each industry but in my experience in the retail space, the customer bases their decision on making a purchase on 4 key things when on a site – in this order:

Price –> Value –> Price –> Delivery Costs and timescales

By placing a price at every point of a customer interaction with a product you allow them to make that consideration of ‘is the price right for me’, then they click through to the product details page where they will evaluate whether that is ‘good value’ based upon the products features and benefits. This then leads them to add an item to their basket,where they will re-evaluate the price as part of their overall shopping journey (i.e. the contents of their basket). the lat bit is fairly self explanatory. If you cant ship by the time they want it or charge too much for delivery then you’ve lost them. Simples.

To put the concept into some form of context.

If you take an offline comparison, why would you send a customer a piece of Direct Mail with some really enticing product and tell them to walk into your store to find out how much it is. You wouldnt – or if you did you would only do it the once as the volume of people walking into the store just wouldn’t make it viable to send out another mailing.

Financial Services, where the actual price is highly dependent on the customer providing some information first before a price is returned, is only slightly different but the same first 3 elements of the journey still very much apply.

Test, test and when you think your all done, Test again.

The easy way to find out if being more up-front with your pricing is going to be beneficial is to run some simple A/B tests on your creative using something like Google Website optimiser.

It is key not to initially look at actual order conversion as a measure of success but look more to either the volume of people clicking through from the landing page to the next step of their journey, or if on a product details page, the percentage of those people adding an item to their basket.

If you get higher volumes into your basket, you can then work out how to improve your conversion from their on in.