Show price, or Get a quote

I know other retailers do it (Amazon, Best Buy.) They have probably done the research so it's likely something that works, at least under certain conditions.

However, you say this would apply to the majority of your items for sale. IMO that may not work, if item after item displays "Get a Quote." This may disconnect the potential customer from engagement if they don't see enough prices to relate to.

If this is something you are interested in pursuing, you may wish to consider testing on just a few items.

Yeah, I understand not showing prices if there are options that affect the price. I try an avoid adding steps to a checkout process-but if I get more opportunities to close a sale... might help. I'll test it out and see if my whole site goes up in flames.

Making the user request a quote does help with establishing a line of communication with the customer, and can possible open up an avenue for negotiation. But very often the customer is simply looking for a price. There may even be an assumption that your price is high if you are not prepared to show it. If you do decide to go down this route done some A-B testing based on existing data and future data.

Mack.

Sound advice, thanks mack

Think like the customer.
From a personal standpoint, as a customer I tend to back away from "Request a Quote". My first objective is to get comparisons on the price, the benefits, the customer satisfaction, customer support accessibility etc.

Asking me to get a quote suggests one of two things:
1. Your price is higher than your competitors and you would lose on the comparison.
2. You want to engage with me for a sales pitch I'm not ready for.

For me, if the price is higher but you are showing me greater benefits of going with your product, even if it's only customer service/satisfaction, you have a greater chance I would select you. Otherwise it's the back button.

I do it often and I suspect a lot of other potentials do the same, but do as Mack suggests and A/B test.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses. The impetus behind considering the change is a lower conversion rate after an extensive redesign. Redirects were handled properly and traffic is steady, but sales have plummeted. They didn't plummet immediately after the switch which was at the end of Jan 2017, but actually improved slightly before resuming a steady decline in April. August and September showed precipitous declines, with revenue 1/10 of historical averages. At this point, I'm willing to try almost anything, thus the "get a quote" button. I asked why other prominent sellers in my niche do not use the "get a quote" button instead of the "add to cart" button, and the answer was that they have brand recognition to get past the dollar amounts, while I don't. This is a fair point, as we are not a big brand. We do have exceptional product knowledge and customer service, which theoretically this feature may allow us to show off. Testing commences shortly. Without forking the thread, if anyone has tips for what to dig into in GA to pinpoint possible causes, I'm all eyes. ;-)

Think like the customer.

As a customer, I'm thinking: what action do I have to take to get this quote?
-- click one button (which incidentally triggers some informational behind-the-scenes scripts that the customer doesn't need to know about): OK, fine, the site's giving me the latest up-to-the-second information.
-- fill out a form and wait for an email response: Oh, hell no.

Good point. How about a near instantaneous text message? People can select the manner in which they wish to be contacted. Our customers are male and female, over 40 mostly, many over 60. A few kids come by now and then the buy lower priced items-those items will still show prices. We're going to start by swapping the quote button in for all products over 1k.

How about a near instantaneous text message?

How do your customers feel about giving out information? For me the Great Divide is whether I have to tell the vendor anything at all in order to learn the price. Product price, that is. Obviously if you're inquiring about shipping, you need to know where it's going. And if it's customized, like an insurance quote, again you need some quasi-personal information from the consumer. But that wouldn't apply to a physical product.

If the pricing isn't going to be given out on-the-spot--right there on the page, as soon as the user is finished filling out forms--make this plain in advance. I don't know about other people, but I am very very very* annoyed when I fill out page after page and then only at the end do I meet a demand for my email address or phone number.


* How many “very”s depends, of course, on how many questions I have answered by this point.

To me:

"Get a Quote" = "Go away".

At least show the price range, with, without, etc. if there is one.

That combined with "Get an exact price quote"

might keep me around, not likely, but it would depend on if the item is easily found/bought elsewhere.

Your consultant is an idiot.

Items are not easily found or bought elsewhere. Will generally be built to order which takes 3-4 weeks, and often cost over 3k. Some items over 50k. These are not impulse purchases, and the buying cycle is quite long.

I think ken_b has the right idea: give a price range up front. Then the more information the prospective buyer gives, the more accurate a price you can offer.

Think of having work done on your house. Before you even start soliciting estimates, you’ll want to know whether the general price range is closer to $2,000 or $50,000. (Guess wrong in one direction and you feel like an idiot for not just going out and ordering the work; guess wrong in the other direction and you have to scrap the whole plan for another few years.) If you’re dealing in something a person doesn’t buy every year, they may not even have a remote idea--and it doesn't sound like the kind of thing where you can Google “how much does a widget cost?”

Maybe some preliminary pick-a-style dropdowns? A two-person widget is $A-$B; the six-person variety is $C-$D; for the 72-hour version, add $E-$Z.

Maybe I missed it, are sales primarily to comsumers or businesses, could make a difference in answers.

Items are not easily found or bought elsewhere.

I asked why other prominent sellers in my niche

On the surface the 2 quotes above seem to conflict a bit, are the major sellers direct competitors (same or similar) items?

... lower conversion rate after an extensive redesign. ... They didn't plummet immediately after the switch which was at the end of Jan 2017, but actually improved slightly before resuming a steady decline in April. August and September showed precipitous declines,

There's a lot of info in that quote.
1: sales were falling
2; redesign saw sale rise for a while
3; sales started falling again and the fall speed increased.

Was the sales slump that the reason for the redesign?

If so, it doesn't sound like a new button is going to help that much, at least until you figure out why the sales slump started before the redesign.

Compared to before the sales slide started, have your competitors changed anything that could have made buying from them preferable?

You mentioned brand awareness (trust?). Has anything changed on your part as to how you handle or promote your brand? How about your competitors, have they made any significant relevant changes?

Looking back through earlier responses I read

The impetus behind considering the change is a lower conversion rate after an extensive redesign.

So what exactly was changed. Does your redesign include a rewording or change in your call to action?
Before adding more changes - trials and errors - I would probably start with a comparison of cta before and after.

if anyone has tips for what to dig into in GA to pinpoint possible causes...

I would suggest segmenting your traffic for analysis to see if that raises any issues. For example you may find that you have a higher percentage of mobile traffic and/or there is an issue with the redesign on mobile browsers.

Our sales are to consumers. I would consider... Breakfast at ___________'s to be in the same market as us. The products we sell are niche within the larger market.

The reason for the redesign was an attempt to reverse a slow decline in sales, our Holiday season (Nov-Dec last year was very strong, but the trend was gradual decline. Site was showing some age and did need a facelift. Part of the decline is due to market conditions (suppliers we used to do some business with starting to sell direct) but our core products are all still available online. The decline in August and Sept were so precipitous I thought it must be a technical issue, but I've been unable to identify a single source. We've been fixing some things-like trust signals, and sign ups are increasing again, but sales are still slow.

I will dig further into the competition to see if they are doing something new.

The redesign changed everything on the site but the content. Text and products all the same, traffic the same, call to action the same.

Phranque, I'll do that, thx.

If I can't see a price, I often assume it is because it is unreasonably high and I move on. I am sure there is some data to show otherwise but for me.... when I am online I am looking for information because either I don't want to, or I don't have time to call.

This is even more true when I am getting prices for a budget estimates. If company A shows the price and company B doesn't I will record the price in my document and note where I got it from. 99 times out of a 100 the company I got the price from is the company I buy from if the budget is approved.

Ok, some developments to report. I decided against testing the Get a Quote instead of Add to Cart. All the comments here, as well as my own reticence to add an unnecessary barrier to checkout played a part.

The other HUGE factor was that I discovered (thanks to a customer calling) that for a long time, almost all of our product pages showed a big red circle next the message "Out of Stock". On our site, where almost everything is built to order, nearly EVERYTHING is technically out of stock. However, showing this message is tantamount to saying "Not Available to Order" which could not be further from the truth, in our case.

Have you visited a site where every item says "Out of Stock"? Not a good look.

This text was set to be hidden on my site, but after an update some months ago, it began appearing on mobile and tablet devices only, which is 65% of our traffic. I never saw the message, because I work on a desktop, and didn't think to check it on mobile because the issue had previously been "Fixed". Doh.

Removed it again Sept 29, and in those 5 days, sales are higher than Aug 1- Sept 28 combined.

Mad and relieved at the same time.

that should have been obvious by mid-august in GA. (i.e. the discrepancy with mobile visitors not hitting the order page)

@akmac in Chrome (or any chromium browser, also in firefox) if you right click on any element and then select inspect element, you get the developer tools window that opens. There is a small icon in the top left corner that show two rectangles, a smaller one in front of a lager one. The icon is to the left of the "Elements" item in the menu. Click on it and you will see the webpage in mobile-emulator mode. You can then select different devices and see a very close approximation of what the page looks on that device. Now from the comfort of your desktop you can see what the site looks like on various mobile devices.

Note that it is not perfect, so you should still do final check on the actual device. But it is pretty accurate most of the time.