Prices on website?

[Kevin-shopVOX]

Personally I'm not a big fan of putting prices online for custom products as many have already stated. If you want someone to buy online give them that opportunity with an ecommerce design your own feature. People who want to buy immediately will and take the workload off of your shop by eliminating the quoting process, the design and any time chasing them down to get the rest of the moolah (if you only took a deposit On a side note looking at your site, which is pretty nice, I would consider removing any and all text that is displayed as an image. In example, your vehicle graphics page. Lots of good info there, but is completely hidden from the search engines because its an image. That content serves two purposes. 1. Information for the visitor and 2. Information for search engine bots to index your page for relevant searches. Just my .02 Cheers!

 

[Smolder]

Howdy, I work with the OP (Spence) and I wanted to thank you all for your responses.

Jim and Dan, your back and forth there has pretty much sealed the decision for me. I originally wanted to post our prices online (I can't stand sites that don't post prices,) but after hearing what you've had to say I've changed my mind.

We aren't really in the vinyl-by-the-pound game, and we don't want to compete with such online companies. Design and customer service are our strengths and to highlight those we need personal interaction. Online pricing would only lead to comparison in the wrong market and neglect our strongest attributes.

So, I think we will just use the pricing sheet for loose estimates done in the actual store. A lot of our customers aren't sure what size they need (most want "medium",) and that makes estimating prices very difficult and time consuming. I hoping that having a price sheet like the one Spence linked will refine that process.

GypsyGraphics: I totally get what you're saying about the dimensioning being a bit awkward and, as per your advice, it will be changed to the standard 'X by X' underneath the example. Thanks for the advice

 

[Rising]

If digital printing in house, would there not be a place in the market for priced items advertised on a website?

We have been considering an e-commerce site for banner stands, pop ups and the like.

I understand advertising $x for a banner stand, only to find the customer who is willing to spend that money on a stand, has no artwork prepped at all, then it could become a pain in the ass unless they are pre warned, or have a decent quantity.

Selling these items would be national, have no relation to our proper trading name, and would not be competing with any local competitors, we would be doing this as a bolt on to the business.

Steve

 

[Rooster]

I have a few prices listed on my website. Just enough to give people and idea of pricing, but not enough to give much away to my competition.

I suppose the most useful thing for you though would be to note that I get more inquiries and close more sales on the section of my website that has no prices listed.

 

[Edserv]

We have some great results from posting tons of content and link-building strategies (with pricing). Our site delivers at least 2 leads per day (on average) and closes at least 5 to 10 orders per month. (These numbers are national- while we also derive approx. 2 call-ins per day in Hawaii.) We worked really hard to get national rankings for several thousand key words, and we drop-ship many of our orders out of CA. You simply can't go wrong with organic (and maybe pay-per-click) strategies with the internet. I don't know what we would do without our website. We are finally gaining momentum after about 2 years of starting our company. If we'd relied totally on local business, we probably wouldn't be here today.
Good luck!
Chris