It is essential to understand how specific sizes and colors are perceived by users. How to display a price on a pricetag is not an easy decision, and it comes only after you have set the product’s price.
Franco Folini
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 find the best solution for price display design. It is essential to understand how specific sizes and colors are perceived by our users. How to display a price on a price tag is not an easy decision, and it comes only after you have set the product’s price. Retail pricing will not be discussed here; we will focus only on the best way to display prices.
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.
Franco Folini
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 selling price size and contrast 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 other components of the price tag, particularly the green “variants” selectors. As a merchant and reseller, Novedge 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.
Price-size is just one of the many choices a designer must make when setting a price. 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 they need to decide 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 absence of a currency symbol can lead to 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 $ or the € sign.
If you are selling only on the domestic market, then you might consider getting rid of the local currency sign, or make it very small.
Franco Folini
Which information should be on 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 a couple of papers that examined the correlation between font size and perceived value.
- Size Does Matter: The Effects of Magnitude Representation Congruency on Price Perceptions and Purchase Likelihood, by Keith S. Coulter and Robin A. Coulter.
- Professional Help: 5 Ways You’re Influenced by Numbers Psychology, by Hans Villarica
