Cool. :)

Carolyn

About this whole pricing thing, I read somewhere (I think it was in Freakonomics) that people pick unround prices not because they’re cheaper, but because it reflects a more exact price.

It’s not that $97.97 looks cheaper than $100 (even though it does), it’s because $97.97 looks like someone put a lot of time into picking that price.

And they’re not trying to round a couple more dollars out of you.

I think we’ll probably try a couple of different prices and see if we can tell which is most popular. I think you’re probably right that there aren’t any set rules for which pricing is best…

I also read a report that claimed to have done a number of split-tests on prices. The author concluded prices that use the number 7 are better than average and prices including the number 3 are much worse than average (doesn’t matter whether it starts or ends in 3, all tests were negative).

James Brausch has also published a post listing prices he says he has tested. He says the best numbers to use in prices are 0, 1, 3, and 5.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080622015036/www.jamesbrausch.org/pricing-digits/

He also links to a PDF by Tim Gross about his results when he conducted a “pick a price” offer.

The flaw with letting your prospects “pick a price” is that it still doesn’t tell you which single price would have produced the most profit.

Anyway, it seems to me that price is worth testing… but that there are no hard and fast rules about which prices work best.

We found at EMA that how prices ended DID make a difference. Prices ending in 3 were particularly bad.

However, we were usually dealing with cents, not dollars.

The key is that we tested. We did NOT rely on guesswork.

The best I have been able to tell from my studies is that the whole “7″ thing began as a result of some testing Ted Nicholas did back in the 80′s or whereabouts. Maybe even as early as the 70′s.

The reason I know this is because of an old Ted Nicholas self-publishing seminar where he was announcing it to the attendees as a “new discovery” of his. Later on, Gary Halbert confirmed this, crediting Ted Nicholas with the discovery.

Then when the internet got popular, people started testing it and then all the copy-cats just joined in, not really knowing WHY they were doing it, just trying to emulate people they knew were successful.

Anyway, in my own tests, I’ve found it to be quite powerful.

–Greg

Yes, interesting concept that I have also heard about elsewhere.

In fact if I remember correctly, I have read that most humans will pick number 7 as a random NUMBER between 1 – 10, similarly the default choice of COLOUR is RED, and a random THING most people will pick is a CHAIR.

So in theory if you are selling 7 RED CHAIRS FOR £7 (or $7) EACH, THEN YOU ARE LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK. It would be interesting to know if anyone has actually tested this.

Shuaib