Five Essentials to Creating an Online Price List
When considering what goes onto your website, you will invariably be focusing on creating content that is of interest to visitors, making the site attractive, and ensuring that SEO aspects like the right keywords and good quality links are taken care of. In going through all this, you can almost feel embarrassed to talk about something as tawdry as how much your products or services cost.
But let’s not hide from the truth – your website is there to make money for your business, and that means you need customers to be pulling out their credit cards and making a purchase. Sooner or later, you need to tell them how much things cost, and you can only do that by providing a price list. Fail to do so, and potential customers will simply go elsewhere and find an alternative supplier that is more transparent.
Here, we take the bull by the horns and looks at five important factors to keep in mind in creating an online price list:
1) Use the right software
Those aspects of focus relating to user experience and having a visually appealing site apply to the price list as much as to any other webpage. What can be worse than an ugly spreadsheet dumped in the midst of your beautifully designed page, of an awkward PDF that has to be downloaded? A bespoke price list template provides the information that customers need in a way that fits seamlessly in with the rest of your content.
2) Be transparent
Forget the myths about people not liking to discuss money. If someone is considering purchasing something, they want to know what it costs, and they want the information quickly, clearly and unambiguously.
3) Include images
A picture does indeed paint a thousand words, and images attract more clicks than text, so it makes sense to include some on your price list. If you are selling something complex, you might need multiple images, but be cautious about overdoing it. To use extreme examples, if you are selling motor cars, several pictures make sense, whereas for six-inch nails, one stock image will be perfectly sufficient.
4) Add some description
Your price list is different to your main product pages, so you do not need to give a full, exhaustive description of each item. At the same time, customers do not know your products as well as you do, so help them out by adding a couple of sentences. The idea is to make the buying process as simple as possible.
5) Be consistent
Most businesses operate through both online and traditional offline methods, whether it is through a physical shop or via telephone sales. It is essential that your price lists are consistent, as plenty of your customers will do business via multiple channels. This is another aspect in which the software solutions mentioned in point 1) can really come into their own, providing an online price list that can also be printed off and used for offline marketing purposes. It will also save you costs and duplicated efforts.