What’s with these companies that don’t show you the price until you check out?

Newegg.com has taken up an experimental deceptive practice of hiding product prices until you are on the very last page of the online shopping process. They are not the first, but we have had several clients experiment with such tactics and based on those results we strongly suggest NEVER doing this, and here is why. With permission we can only show you statistics on two clients who attempted this and while their volume probably does not compare to Newegg, the risk is readily apparent.

Case 1 Garments and luggage: Prior to this experiment they were running a very respectable abandonment rate of 65%. We consider anything less than 70% to be pretty good based on our experience. However, this client was disappointed by overall volume and decided to hide prices on certain items. Only about 10% of the inventory had hidden prices, yet the abandonment rate immediately shot up to 77% and here’s the big rub. Upon pulling the plug on this 2 week social experiment their volume had fallen 20% and it took nearly 3 months to recover! In hindsight, and again, with permission, we pulled statistics on abandonment rate of just the carts that contained these “surprise price” items, and it was more than 85%! Interestingly the other carts were still at 70+% which seemed to say customers did not appreciate the game, even when they didn’t shop for those specific items.

Case 2: We only have permission to mention a few vague details here. Abandonment rate for this client was admittedly higher than we prefer, however upon attempting the “bait and shock” strategy (as we now call it) it increased by nearly 10%. Again it took several months to recover, and volume suffered severely.

So experiment at your own peril. We have determined that customers are offended by such tactics, and among an admittedly small sample, voted that this violates the trust necessary for a customer to trust us with their billing information. Of course our clients are boss, but we offer dire warnings for free. Don’t do it!

It’s the least we can do for our clients. Experience is an important part of our value. Many of our customers are coming here only after being burned by salesmanship from other shops. A common violation of our customer trust we’ve seen is making wild claims about capabilities and possibilities. Unless our client is Newegg talking in “millions” is irrational. A million is a huge number, even in web terms, and while it sounds nice and persuasive it’s unrealistic. For many small shops you might as well talk billions as millions. Be happy with a thousand, or even a few hundred active accounts. We manage a few sites that exceed a million hits a month, but even that does not translate into a million sales a month. Even a 1% ratio of hits to orders is doing pretty good. If your web developer is talking nonsense, like “millions”, it does call their credibility and experience into serious doubt.