Ask HN: Pricing Help for Web Application
The Premise: I have a widget and my customers are owners of ecommerce sites and my widget would help them save on returned orders. The widget would have to be installed on each product page.
The Problem: I'm trying to figure a way to differentiate pricing for different sized ecommerce stores. Right now I can just charge say $19.99/month to use the widget, but that means any store from the small niche to walmart could use it for $19.99/month, which just doesn't seem right.
Is there some way, that would make sense to the customer, to tier the pricing? Say charge some small amount like .5 cents per click on the widget? I would have to correlate the number of clicks to money saved and price appropriately but I am just wondering if it is worth it or am I just confusing the customer who just wants to pay a set monthly fee?
It would be nice to be able to say there are four packages (19.99, 99.99, 199.99, etc) but I just don't know how to differentiate that fairly.
Any help is appreciated.
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If the widget is hosted on your server then you could bracket your plans based on the traffic. So you could say $19.99 for up to 50,000 page views a month, etc. How valuable your widget is would determine how much you can charge (be sure to factor in your bandwidth costs as well if the widget is a decent size).
One other comment, encouraging people to click on anything other than the "buy now" button on a product page isn't going to be very appealing to most e-commerce people. Returns are expensive, but the last thing people want to do is deter orders.
Here's a great article on the subject from Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot founder). http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Software-Without-Just-Rolling-The-Dice.aspx ↗