Five Ecommerce Pricing Strategies to Maximise Customers, Conversions & Profits

Pricing is key the success of an ecommerce retailer.

Charge too much and nobody buys, regardless of how good your products are. Too little and profits get razor thin. BigCommerce research even found that competitive pricing was the single biggest store feature driving purchasing decisions.

But with so many different ecommerce pricing strategies out there, it’s difficult to know which one will work best. So in this post we go through five key pricing strategies to help:

• Attract more people to your store;
• convert more browsers into buyers;
• and boost overall profits.

SEE ALSO: 7 Psychological Pricing Strategies to Boost Ecommerce Conversions

Ecommerce pricing strategies for traffic

The first thing you need to do before making any sales is get people to come to your online store in the first place. And one lucrative way to attract people to your store is through utilising various ecommerce pricing strategies.

1) Try Loss-leader based pricing

When you implement a loss-leader strategy, you pick a select product that makes little or even no profit. The purpose is to create such a great deal around a product that people stick around to look at the other products you have - ones you do make a profit on.

You can also use the loss-leader approach on items where there's a necessity to buy supplementary products. A great example of this is Gillette.

Often the actual razor is sold with little to no profit generated because the supplier understands once you own the razor, you’ll need to come back to buy the  blades.

That doesn't mean a loss-leader won't work if your business model doesn’t involve products where customers need to come back to replenish heads, blades, etc. Often, store owners will  have a major sale on one product with the view that if they provide their customers with a good, helpful experience, they’ll go on to buy other products.

This is a tactic often used on days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day. People usually go onto Amazon looking for something specific, not just to browse for inspiration.

But special deal days bring people to their site with the goal of getting them to purchase as much as possible:

Some of these items may very well be loss-leaders being used to pull in customers who'll also purchase more profitable items at the same time.

2) Free + shipping based pricing

Another ecommerce pricing strategy you can use to attract customers to your online store is to set certain products for free with the customer only paying for shipping.

Free + shipping is a similar approach to the loss-leader where you can use the concept of a really good deal to lure people into your store who then might be interested in looking at (and purchasing) other products.

Be careful how you do this though. If you say a product  is free but then charging $150 for shipping it will annoy prospective customers and they may never come back.

If you're going to offer free shipping, be as transparent as possible in regards to how much shipping will actually cost your customers.

Ecommerce pricing strategies for conversions

Whether your audience find your store through word-of-mouth, an advert, social media or organic search, you need to find ways to convert them into customers.

This is only becoming more important as the ecommerce landscape gets more competitive, which is probably why 30% of ecommerce retailers are considering investing in CRO in 2021.

So here are two ecommerce pricing strategies to convince people to make a purchase once they land on your site.

3) Anchor pricing

Anchor pricing is a strategy where you show the value of the price of a product by anchoring it next to another one.

This helps build an image in the shopper’s mind that they're getting a good deal because they can see the price they could be paying. It's like how, in a brick-and-mortar store, they will sometimes put more expensive items before less expensive ones.

When you have walked past a $200 doller scarf, at $100 shirt looks like a steal! TJ Maxx is a great example of an ecommerce store using anchor pricing. They often price items at, say, "$32.00, reduced from $39.99 and an RRP of $109.00". They also make it explicitly clear to the customer that they're saving, say, $77 with a total price reduction of 71%.

And if we compare that to similar shirt on the actual clothing item's brand website, we can see the stark price difference. This is likely to sway shoppers who perhaps hadn’t considered buying a designer shirt.

Anchor pricing can still be effective for smaller ecommerce sellers though. Just don’t price your products too low, or you’ll ruin your chance of profit. Within the industry, studies have shown a discount of 5-10% is enough to create that memorable moment and sense of value.

Anchor pricing works by setting the original price as the reference or anchor point in the minds of consumers. They then use this reference point to form an opinion of how much they’d be happy to pay.

4) Using Bundles

Bundle pricing is very common for apparel stores and is another great ecommerce pricing strategy to convert consumers when they land on your website.

The tactic works by selling multiple products for one single price point, hence 'bundling' them together.

For example: HappySocks.com lets you buy four pairs of socks in a bundle for $20.97. Yet buying the same four items individually would cost $27.86.

This works not just because of the price difference. But also becuase it stops customers having to manually add each of the four pairs of socks to the basket. If they do this they are much more likely to question the purchase and ask whether they really need that third or fourth pair.

Whereas, with a bundle, they can only have to use one click. This strategy also works for complemetary products. Which is why you will often see games consoles bundled up with games.

Be careful when you do use the bundle ecommerce pricing strategy because if you make the costs too low, you’ll have severe trouble trying to sell the same products at individual prices.

However, it's also a great way to move stale stock out of your warehouse.  And one often used on event days like Prime Day for this reason.

Ecommerce pricing strategies for profits

When you’ve attracted people to your store and encouraged them to make a purchase, it’s time to increase the amount of profit you generate.

Using a dynamic ecommerce pricing strategy is a fantastic way of doing this.

5) Dynamic rather than static pricing

Airlines and travel sites are infamous for changing their prices based on demand. The more tickets sold, the higher prices tend to be.

This is known as dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing  gives retailers flexibility in their pricing. Allowing them to increase and generate more profit when business is booming, or decrease to increase sales when business is a lot slower.

This is often why you might see prices fluctuating depending on time of year, time of day and where you're buying it from. You've dealt with dynamic pricing yourself if you have ever tried to order an Uber at a busy time!

The alternative to dynamic pricing is static pricing. Where you keep one price and change it manually when needed - usually in line with updating ecommerce pricing strategies across the company.

Dynamic pricing is different in that it has multiple price points instead of just one. These price points can be based on any criteria you choose. Although there are four popular tactics used by most ecommerce retailers:

• Time-based. Where vendors adjust their prices based on how long a product has been on the market.
• Demand. The higher the demand is, the higher you price that product.
• Segmentation. Where retailers offer one price point to a certain segment of customers and a completely different price point to another.

Just like you’d use software to track inventory, you should also use an ecommerce price tracking software to automate this process and ensure your prices increase or decrease based on accurate predictions.

Takeaways

Getting your pricing right can be the difference between your ecommerce store being successful or failing. Price your items too high and no one will buy, too low and you’ll struggle to make profit.

There’s no one-size fits all approach you can use, and you’ll need to work out what works best for your company based on the products you choose to sell.

So getting your pricing strategy right involves a mix of testing and streamlining the processes we’ve outlined in this post.