Imagine you go to a web shop to buy a neckless. You find a nice piece and to find out the price, you have to e-mail support. “Hmm, a bit expensive…”, you say when you get the answer after a few minutes, so you keep on browsing. Each time you find something of interest you e-mail support to get the price and after 45 minutes you finally have found something that looks perfect and fits your budget.
Any web shop with this concept would be out of business before lunch, but this is still how much of the business in physical retail is conducted. The jewelry example is from a while when me and my wife was looking for a gift at NK, which is like the Harrod´s of Stockholm. Not that they didn’t have price tags, it was just impossible to see the price as the price tags where upside down or hidden behind the glass of the counter. But you´ll find this everywhere and at many places there are not even price tags, you literally have to ask the staff each time.
The grandmaster of retail, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, figured out the importance of clear pricing already back in the fifties. Low pricing is a key factor for IKEA´s success but clear pricing is equally important. Why? Two main reasons:
1. Uncertainty is a showstopper
2. Nobody wants to feel stupid
People like predictability and the sense of having control over a situation. Presenting the price is a fundamental factor of providing control at the point of sale. The second thing is that people don’t want to feel stupid by asking something where the answer poses a risk of making them embarrassed. And it is embarrassing when you have to ask for the price, just to find yourself making up some story of why you don´t want it when the truth is that you just can´t afford it.
In Sweden, just as in many countries, physical retail is going through Armageddon and many large retail chains have gone bust, not to mention independent stores. And Amazon has not even entered the Swedish market, so things will go from bad to worse soon. Physical retail has many advantages against e-commerce and there is plenty of room for innovation. Displaying prices is not exactly rocket science, but for now it’s a great place to start.
Leave A Reply