The Importance Of Testing Your Pricing

Craft Maker Pro » The Importance Of Testing Your Pricing

We talk a lot about pricing when it comes to your craftwork and the importance of getting it right.

pricepoints-testFirstly its very important to make sure that you are making a profit on your handmade items and not just guessing what materials are going in there.

We’ll cover that in a minute but first I’m going to open the book on some real life testing that we did here at Craft Maker Pro just to give you an idea of how important testing prices can be.

We have been selling Craft Maker Pro for over a year now at the price point of $197. Now that’s a very fair price considering all the functionality that it covers and just like you in your business we need to make sure we cover our costs of development, support, updates and so on.

However what we decided to do in the last few weeks were some very coordinated price point tests.

What we found really shocked us, but we’re glad we did it.

We ran our tests with 3 different price points simultaneously.

One for $97, one for $147 and one for our original price of $197.

The way we did this was to create three identical pages and what’s called a “split test” using Google Experiments.

Essentially what this does is when people click on the order button the experiment will direct them to one of the three options we have set up. We then track the order and see which one converts the best.

The results shocked us!

The $147 dollar price point out sold each of the other two by 6 to 1.

That’s a huge number. And consider this, it wasn’t the lowest price point at $97 that sold the most, it was the middle ground price point.

So, that obviously told us one thing, we had our price point wrong for Craft Maker Pro and we have changed it effective last Monday to reflect this.

But how does that help you?

Well other than the fact that you can now get Craft Maker Pro at $50 less than it has been retailing for since we launched it I hope that you understand the importance of testing your pricing as well.

First things first!

Understand what your costs are for your business and the items that you can create. Craft Maker Pro can help you do this quickly and easily with our inbuilt hourly rate calculator and inventory management.

Once you properly understand your costs then you can test your pricing and at least be sure that you are not undervaluing your work and losing money, that’s not going to help you run a successful craft business at all.

Now its time to test your pricing.

You might do this in your online shop or Etsy store by simply changing the price for a week on some items and taking note of how they sell.

Another way to do this is to try split testing some offers on Facebook with sponsored posts to you fans. You could post one offer to fans in one state and a different price point offer to fans in another state and see which one makes the most sales.

You can also use your email marketing skills if you use Aweber or Mail Chimp especially as they will allow you to split test email promotions so you can create two offers and email them out and see which one gets the best response.

The most important thing when testing price points though is to make sure that you have everything else the same.

Do not have two slightly different offers with different images or descriptions as well as different prices as that will throw your testing results off.

Keep everything identical, except for the price or the real reason for an increase or decrease in sales could be because of the different image or headline you used.

Once you have mastered the idea of split testing for price then you can do the same for anything.

  • Test different descriptions. Maybe longer is better than shorter or vice versa.
  • Test different headlines for your pieces.
  • Test different photos and angles, maybe having more photos from every angle will help or maybe less is more.

The point is you don’t know what you don’t know so test, test and test some more. I can guarantee that some of the results may surprise you.

Oh, and don’t forget, if you want to test your pricing making sure that you at least know your correct costs first of all.

Gary Capps
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