To hide the price of a product in an e-commerce store, you obscure it from the customer’s view anytime they look at the item. In e-commerce, every product has its landing or product page. In order to view a product’s pricing when it is hidden, users must either add the item to their basket or sign up or log in. This is a nudge toward conversion.

A potential consumer may discover your product’s hidden costs while searching for a specific item. However, if the user wants it and is a potential client in a true sense, they will join up or add it to their shopping cart.

In addition, this helps you avoid dealing with traffic that doesn’t qualify as potential clients, which saves you time and effort. With this extra time, you can focus on providing better service to current and new consumers. It’s going to be worth it in the long run. In the e-commerce sector, there is a debate about whether or not firms should disguise their prices.

Reasons behind adopting ‘Hide Price strategy.’

1. Raises Curiosity

Products with hidden prices can increase the curiosity of the customers. As a business, you can hide the price of a range of products and not all since this might not work for all situations.

2. Price Increase Announcement

Buyers would have no foundation for pricing a product high or low because they won’t be able to see its price. You have absolute control over pricing at this point. You can charge users high or cheap based on your anticipated intentions or the existing market demand-supply situation.

3. Customer Relationship Building

Customers would be encouraged to contact you personally via phone, text, or quotation due to hidden prices. Your suppliers will have more opportunities to provide product advice to customers, increasing the likelihood of potential customers making a purchase.

4. Avoid Unfair Competition

When you show the price in your e-commerce store, your competitive sites can steal your potential customers and compete directly with you with the same product price. Thus, when you hide the price, you also reduce the likelihood of any unfair competition.

5. Better Engagement

Hiding product prices can be one of the best methods of improving customer engagement. The store owner is encouraged to contact consumers when prices are hidden, and consumers are also more intrigued by other variables when considering the product for purchase. On the brighter side, you can hide prices to give your company more options to improve customer experience through consultation and improve and enhance customer interactions.

Why hide price in e-commerce for B2C Customers? (Advantages)

1. Improved Cost Negotiation

Customers, either B2B or B2C, have a burning urge to receive discounts. Providing a tailored price with an acceptable discount rate to a B2B customer that buys a significant quantity of products is necessary. Hide the price to allow the vendor and the buyer additional opportunities to negotiate a fair deal. You can compensate for the discount by using other incentives such as coupons, gift vouchers or promotions, and so on.

2. Price Competition is reduced

Similarly, publishing prices on product sites unwittingly opens the door for competitors to steal your prices, or worse, enables competitors to compete with your product prices directly. As a result, you might continue to hide your price to ensure that others do not steal it and engage in unfair practices.

Downsides of hiding price in e-commerce for B2C Customers

1. Sometimes, buyers will start approaching your sales team with a slew of inquiries about the goods since the pricing has been kept hidden. This might be okay when you operate in a field that necessitates careful consideration of service/product prices, such as SaaS. But, if your company is in a low-cost goods area, too much consultancy could consume a lot of your time.
2. Regular consultation helps consumers and companies create relationships; however, consulting time decreases sales performance and raises acquisition costs and effort to discover new clients. Moreover, some B2B buyers may ask a range of questions, but they will still refuse to buy any of your items since they believe they will not be a good fit.

Why hide price in e-commerce for B2B Customers? (Advantages)

1. Boost Customer Interest

Customers can be encouraged to contact individual products directly and, if feasible, ask for a price by viewing concealed products among a list of products with freely accessible pricing (e.g., on product listing categories).

It is not necessary for products that require hidden charges to be best-sellers. They could be a collection of things that are urgently needed to be sold.

2. Increase the product’s value

The first thing you’ll notice about a product is its pricing, which will give you the impression that the item’s value is reflected in its asking price. In contrast, if you only view the product’s appearance without seeing its price, the product’s worth looks to be higher than it is. Using this information in conjunction with the option to conceal product prices on the product page, you have a possible revenue-boosting strategy.

Downsides of hiding price in e-commerce for B2B Customers

1. Not everyone is comfortable with needing to initiate contact to make a purchase. Consciously delivering a quote to the store is the quickest way for B2B clients or wholesalers to bargain and understand a product. Most B2C consumers, on the other hand, disagree. For a considerable part of B2C customers, actively contacting suppliers may cause additional hassles and leave a negative impression.
2. When a viewer perceives the concealed price, there is little uncertainty that a part of the customer will question the product’s validity. They are still fearful of losing money; therefore, they are wary and careful whenever they need to spend money on products, regardless of how pricey or inexpensive it is. Hiding prices on the item and categories pages will almost certainly turn off this demographic of visitors.

How to Hide price in e-commerce?

Follow these steps to conceal the Price field on your storefront:

1. Go to Inventory > Products in your Admin Area.
2. To edit a product, select the Product Code.
3. Put “0.00” in the Price field.
4. In the Product Price Name box of the Advanced Info tab of the Product Display tab, type ” ” (without the quotations).

Conclusion

The feature of Hide Price in Ecommerce is suitable for B2B and B2C, but it also has certain disadvantages.

In B2B, the concealed price function has fewer downsides than that in B2C, while yielding an equal amount of positives. You need to assess the advantages and the disadvantages and make an informed decision towards implementing the steps.