Should You Put Prices on Your Website?

Ask ten marketing people whether to put prices on a trade website and you get ten confident answers, roughly half of them opposite.

That should tell you the honest answer is conditional. Both camps are right about different businesses, and most advice is written by somebody who has only ever seen one of them.

Here is the actual trade off, and the middle option that suits more small service businesses than either extreme.

What is really being asked

When somebody looks for a price on your website, they are almost never trying to compare you against three competitors on a spreadsheet.

They are trying to find out whether they are in the right neighbourhood. Is this a two hundred dollar problem or a two thousand dollar problem. Are they about to be embarrassed on the phone. Is there any point in ringing at all.

An anchor answers that. Silence does not, and silence has a cost that is invisible to you, because the person who leaves without ringing never appears in any number you look at.

The case for publishing

It filters. The calls you stop getting are mostly the calls you were going to lose anyway, after fifteen minutes on the phone. Time is the scarcest thing a small operator has.

It reads as confident. A business that states a number sounds like a business that knows its own work. Vagueness about price reads, fairly or not, as a business that decides what to charge based on the customer.

It reduces the awkward conversation. Both parties already know the shape of the thing. The call starts at the job rather than at the money.

It is a genuine differentiator in most trades, because so few competitors do it.

The case against publishing

Real jobs vary, and a number gets remembered as a promise. A price published without its conditions becomes the number a customer quotes back at you in a driveway.

It invites comparison on the one dimension where you may not want to compete. If your price is higher because your work is better, a bare number strips out the reason.

Prices go stale. A page listing last year's rates is worse than no page, and it is exactly the kind of maintenance that gets forgotten. If nobody owns updating it, do not publish it.

Some work genuinely cannot be priced without seeing it. Nobody can quote a rewire from a web form, and pretending otherwise sets up a bad first meeting.

The middle option almost nobody uses

The choice is not between a full price list and total silence. There is a lot of ground in between, and it is where most trades belong.

Publish the call out or diagnostic fee. This is usually a genuinely fixed number, it answers the immediate question, and it commits you to nothing about the job itself. "Diagnostic visit is a flat fee, and it comes off the repair if you go ahead" is a complete, honest, useful sentence.

Publish the minimum. "We do not take jobs under a certain size" saves everybody an afternoon.

Publish a starting price for the things that repeat. Seasonal tune ups, drain clearing, panel upgrades, standard installs. The words "starts at" are doing real work and everybody understands them.

Publish a range with the reason it is a range. A range with no explanation looks evasive. A range that says what pushes a job to the top of it is genuinely informative, and it makes you sound like somebody who has done the work rather than somebody guessing.

Publish the method instead of the number. How you charge. Hourly or fixed. Whether quotes are free. Whether there is a charge for evenings and weekends. Whether parts are marked up. That is often what the visitor is really asking, and none of it can go stale in the way a number can.

Publish what is included. Whatever number you show, next to it say what the customer gets. That is what stops the page being a price comparison and starts it being an explanation.

How to write it so it does not bite you

Say what the number is for, in the same sentence.

Say what it does not cover.

Date it, or write it so it does not need a date. "Our diagnostic fee is X" needs reviewing. "We charge a flat diagnostic fee, quoted when you book" never goes out of date, and it still gives the visitor the shape of the thing.

Never publish a number you would not honour. That is the whole reason to be careful, and it is a bigger deal than any of the marketing arguments. A price on a website is a claim, and this business does not make claims it cannot stand behind.

Put it on the relevant service page rather than a separate pricing page. Somebody reading about drain clearing wants the drain clearing price at the moment they are reading about drain clearing, not two clicks away.

The decision, in one question

Does the work have a repeatable unit?

If yes, publish that unit's price and say what it includes. Service calls, tune ups, standard installs, routine maintenance, anything you have quoted the same way fifty times.

If no, publish the fixed parts around the variable work. The call out fee, the minimum, the hourly rate, whether the quote is free, and how you arrive at a number. Then say plainly that the job itself has to be seen, and why. That sentence loses you nothing, because the visitor already suspected it.

Either way, publish something. The version that costs you most is the site that says nothing about money at all and leaves the visitor to guess, because a fair number of them guess high and ring somebody else.

Where this sits in the rest of the site

Price is one item in a longer list of things a service site has to settle. The full page by page version is in what to put on a contractor website.

If you are on the other side of this question and trying to price your own web work rather than your trade work, what to charge to build a small business website is the one you want.

And if the site already has prices on it and still produces nothing, price is unlikely to be the problem. Why your website is not getting calls works through the reasons that usually are, and our free site check will read your page and list what is missing before you spend a weekend rewriting it.