This article was first posted on LinkedIn on October 29, 2018.
Finding the best way to display a product’s price on an e-commerce product page can be challenging. A/B testing can certainly help you in finding the best solution for price display design, but it is essential to understand why specific sizes and colors are working better than others. The decision on how to display a price comes after you decided how to price the product. Retail pricing will not be discussed here, only the best way to display the price.
What is pricing psychology in eCommerce?
It’s not always intuitive that the best way to display a price is to use a medium font size. Clarity would recommend a bigger font to let the price stand out. But we humans perceive numbers that occupy more screen space as more substantial than those that take up less space. We all perceive products with prices displayed in large font as more expensive. When showing a competitive price, we need to avoid large font sizes to avoid confusing our visitors, and we also want to avoid small font sizes to make it easy for users to locate and read the price. One option to match the clarity of a big font is to use a sharp contrast between the price and the background.
Stay away from large font sizes to avoid confusing our visitors, and avoid small sizes to make it easy to locate and read the price
A case study from Novedge
The image on the left shows the price tag of a product on the Novedge website. I determined the optimal size and contrast of the selling price through a series of A/B tests. As expected, the results confirmed the theory about the balance between small and big fonts.
In this specific case, the price area also has to compete for the user’s attention with all other components of the price tag, in particular with the green “variants” selectors. As a merchant and reseller, Novedge, as a reseller, has no control over the number or the complexity of a product’s variants, we only control how to present those options to our customers. The price-size is just one of the many choices and decisions a designer has to make when creating a price tag. Most of the options and pieces of information you see on the price tag are almost mandatory. Indeed, the price tag must meet visitors’ expectations and provide the core information needed to enable them to make a decision and click the [Add to Cart] button. As designers, we need to meet the expectations created by the look and content of the most popular e-commerce websites. Other price tag components are intended to convey additional important information about the product offer, such as the variants.
Do I have to remove the dollar sign?
Some websites remove the dollar sign (or your local currency sign) to further simplify price display. Removing the currency symbol is an option that should be carefully evaluated. If you have customers purchasing from abroad, the lack of a currency sign can create unpleasant misunderstandings that should be avoided. If you are selling only to the domestic market and there is no ambiguity about the meaning of the price indicator, you can remove the $ sign.
If you are selling only on the domestic market
then you might consider getting rid of the dollar sign
Which information should I include in the price tag?
There are other components competing for real estate on the price tag. The most common are MSRP, discount, SKU, UPC, “Competitive Price” label, and territory. Which one of those optional items should be included? Where to position them? How much relevance to give them? Those are difficult questions, without a simple, straight answer. For a small and medium eCommerce website, it can also be challenging, if not impossible, to measure the impact of each one of those options with an A/B test. Most of those elements are not clickable, and their contribution to the conversion rate is in the hundredth or thousandth of a point. For those options, A/B tests don’t provide sufficient confidence to support a decision. Here is where intuition and a solid marketing strategy can help you to make the best decisions.
References
For more information, I would recommend the original paper that for the first time analyzed the correlation between font size and value perception.
Size Does Matter: The Effects of Magnitude Representation Congruency on Price Perceptions and Purchase Likelihood, by Keith S. Coulter and Robin A. Coulter.