How to Price Products
December 5, 2006 – 12:49 am
As previously mentioned I've been working on taking an existing site which sells digital products. To explain briefly, the site sells Tattoo flashes. These are digital 'sheets' of tattoo designs, each sheet containing 5-7 tattoos on. The tattoos are created by a good friend of mine (and business partner in another business but that's another story!) and only he and we sell them.
However despite the interest in the Flashes it seems to me that people aren't keen on paying out for a flash of at least 5 tattoos when they maybe only want one of them. It didn't occur to me until I met a friend of a client who's from the US and spent many years working in marketing out there. He was trying to explain to my client that people wouldn't like paying £X per year for a subscription service to multiple options when most people would only use one of those options. Despite how much people pay, if they think that they're paying more than they should then they may not buy at all.
It made sense as we've not sold a great deal of flashes and I don't think any of them have been to UK buyers. I'm in the belief that the average UK online shopper will only buy from sites that look professional and/or sites that they've heard of. At present our site simply shows the flashes and a checkbox next to each then a simple 'buy at paypal' button to take the money. So taking both this idea and the thought that perhaps people would buy if they had the choice of a single tattoo I've been working on slicing up the flashes into single tattoos (still offering the flashes as a more worth the money purchase), setting this all up in a database (73 single tattoos about another 7 to add) and just have to finish coding up the script to lay these out on the site and add in a little shopping basket to hopefully make the site seem more professional and also in the hope that people want to buy more than one (buying one at present would be nice!).
So now, after my rambling, I come to my question. At present the flashes are priced at £8.99 as this is the same price as my friend sells them for. The price match isn't a major issue as he gets a cut for each sold, but I figured his price was the right one to use. However my thinking says then to price single tattoos at £2.99 each but is £2.99 too low sounding? If I was to increase the single tattoo price then I would imagine I'd need to increase the flash prices. I would imagine a price of around £4.99 for a single tattoo would possibly sound a bit better but could I still keep the £8.99 for the flash?
When is cheap too cheap?
5 Responses to “How to Price Products”
I've never really sold much so I don't know pricing..
If I were buying an original 1 of a kind tattoo design I wouldn't mind paying up to $100 for a design, however for a copy probably not much at all, maybe $10 so I could quit searching if I found something I liked at your site.
By 45n5 on Dec 5, 2006
Tattoo's are not cheap - so why should a tattoo flash be cheap? A person thinking of getting a tatt has money to spend.
By Burty on Dec 5, 2006
Taking both comments into consideration I'm thinking along the lines of £4.99 for a single tattoo and £14.99 for the group flash. I know people are prepared to pay for a good tattoo but there are a couple of sites I've found with some great tattoos available for free so I've go to make the price worthwhile but still compete with free tattoo sites.
By Sarah on Dec 5, 2006
I'd be more inclined to purchase a couple at a price like £4.99 rather than over inflating the individual tattoo prices. I think this way you're getting people to your site who want "affordable" tattoos - and if it were a 1 of a kind tattoo you could get people to pay more… almost like what they do at templatemonster.com - in offering a low price for multiple purchases… but if you really want it - you can buy it out at a higher price.
… that might be more complicated than you really want it to be… but it's just an idea
By Empress on Dec 5, 2006
I don't want to over inflate the individual tattoo prices hence the price of less than a fiver. However because I've had the price of the group flashes (contain 5-7 tattoos on) at £8.99 for the past year I'm not sure if suddenly raising this price is okay. But then at the same time I don't think we get many repeat visitors at present so I doubt people would notice the difference!
I think £4.99 for a single tattoo makes it worth the cost. The fees are covered with a small profit left over. Then the price of £14.99 for the big flashes that contain at least 5 of these tattoos in a natural grouping. This means that the big flash is virtually the same price as 3 single tattoos, so buyers get at least 2 extra for free.
For example we have one for all the signs of the Zodiac so each one would cost £4.99 but you can get all 12 (worth almost £60) for just £14.99. That's different to the norm as there are 12 on there instead of the usual average of 6, but if someone maybe wants them all or has a use for more than 3 then it's more worth their while to buy the flash.
Does that make sense?
As for the TM idea, Empress, it's an idea but not something I'd want to do with this site plus they're not my designs to sell the ownership for. But it's an idea for another site that I may have a stake in
By Sarah on Dec 5, 2006