10 Tips on Pricing Your Product or Service


tips on pricing your product

When you’re first starting your business, understanding what customers are willing to pay for your product or service can be a real challenge. If you price too low, you’ll lose interest, but if you price too high, you’ll lose appeal.

That’s why we asked 10 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

“What is your best advice for a founder who is trying to determine how much customers are willing to pay for a product or service?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Understand the Indirect Competition

“How you should price a product varies dramatically between B2B and B2C offerings, but what most founders overlook is the indirect competition vying for their customer’s dollars. Customers don’t compare products and services in a vacuum, they compare offerings not only in your vertical but outside of it. Find out the common indirect competition and understand how you compare.” ~ Nick ReeseBroadbandNow

2. Split Test and Validate With Actual Customers

Pricing is an important decision that should be made leveraging data, not guess work. Create a landing page that describes your product and it’s price. Also include a credit card entry form. Then, use an A/B testing tool to display different prices to different subsets of users. See how many credit cards you collect from each of the different price points (but don’t actually charge the cards).” ~ Jonny SimkinSwyft

3. Break Out Tiers

“Tiered pricing is a simple way to find out which features are most valuable as well as which price points are going to drive the highest conversion rates. While many first-time customers will gravitate to the “cheapest” package, offering upsell packages to existing customers through segmented market automation can allow for testing different price points without having to publish prices publicly.” ~ Dan GoldenBe Found Online

4. Use Bottom-Up Pricing

“I’d rather get customers paying at a lower price but paying than have too high a price point and zero customers coming in the door. Start by asking a few customers a fair price. Once they sign up, keep raising the price for new users until you notice that the percentage of people singing up is decreasing. That’s when you know you’ve hit your right pricing structure.” ~ John RamptonDue

5. Ask for the Sale

“You’ll never know how much someone will pay until money changes hands. Many founders make the mistake of asking people how much they would pay for something. Theoretical spending answers do not reflect reality! Instead pre-sell your product or service by actually asking for the sale. You’ll quickly find out how much people are really willing to pay.” ~ Laura RoederMeetEdgar.com

6. Don’t Underprice Products

“If you sell a product (as opposed to an automated online service), price it as high as you can get away with so you still have enough people willing to buy it. You can always come down on price later as your efficiencies improve. Look at your competition, and don’t try to undercut when starting out. Just make a better product.” ~ Wei-Shin LaiAcousticSheep LLC

7. Determine Desired Profit Margins

“It doesn’t matter what customers are willing to pay if margins don’t cover expenses. It’s important to understand the costs involved in building, servicing and selling a product/service before determining the price. Once that’s done, see if customers are willing to buy. If not, then the product isn’t a good fit at the price, needs to be improved or the inputs to cost of goods need to be reduced.” ~ Mark Cenicola, BannerView.com

8. Connect Yourself to the Right People

“Identify your ideal customer, and do what it takes to get them in the door. If you connect yourself to the right kind of customers, success breeds success, and you can begin increasing pricing as your experience and customer base grows.” ~ Lindsay MullenProsper Strategies

9. Find the Right Anchor

“Read “Priceless” by William Poundstone, and get familiar with the concept of price anchoring. In short, people really don’t have any clue as what something “should cost.” They often decide based on clues (or anchors) that are immediately available on the spot when making the purchase (like the price of theproduct sitting on the shelve next to yours). Take advantage of this and anchor right.” ~ Juha LiikalaStripped Bare Media

10. Focus Geographically and Demographically

“You have to search geographically and demographically to see who you are targeting. It really comes down to finding the sweet spot of not too high and not too low, so it takes the right amount of research to figure out just exactly where your product or service will be worth their money, convenient enough and worth it.” ~ Josh York, GYMGUYZ

Price Tag Photo via Shutterstock

7 Comments ▼

The Young Entrepreneur Council The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

7 Reactions
  1. In my experience #1 and #9 are related. People often are comparing you to indirect competition, so you need to know how that is priced. You can then use it to your advantage to set a better anchor. For example, if you’re selling grass-fed beef like my dad it’s helpful to get people to compare the price to a steakhouse instead of the grocery store meat counter. Then that $18/lb price on tenderloin starts looking much more reasonable when they know a filet would cost them over $35 at a steakhouse.

  2. Number 4 above is one of the biggest myths in pricing. Nine out of 10 companies are unsuccessful at low-balling their price and raising it later. Always better & easier to start high and come down.

  3. Yes, I have met with a business owner once who keeps pulling down prices just to win a sale. I told him it is not good as it will make his product’s value go down. He doesn’t realize it until the customer walked away even with lower prices.

  4. Validate post on ways to fix a price of a products, as unnecessary hiking or doubling price without doing market research, wouldn’t help any business person to give a perfect look to their business. Rather keeping themselves out of price war & going for genuine price tag can definitely do wonders for every business.

  5. The Price Is Right! 😉 I will take these tips in account when I am setting prices for my new tea hobby business in the future. I have now learned a new word, anchoring. 🙂

  6. Thanks for these tips! I think that learning information from people who are in the sphere or budiness they are talking about is priceless. Everybody who own a business can learn somerhing useful.