Raising my prices: Will I regret it? 🤔

You will regret not doing it.

Jason Cohen said this about pricing on the IH Podcast:

I say price is part of the product. When you think about cars, price is part of what the car is. It’s part of what the product is. It’s part of the brand. It’s part of what it means to buy and drive that car. It’s not a separate thing. "First, let’s see if you want leather seats or not, then we’ll talk about the price," is not how it works. To me, those are not separate.

So it's not surprising that when you say that your customers think cheap prices mean your themes are cheap or low quality. Price and product are inseparable. If you charge people lower prices than what they're used to paying, they're going to assume they're getting a lower quality product. The inverse is also true.

No. You won't regret raising it. You'll learn if it works for one, but most likely it won't be as big of a deterrent as you think.

Also, let's say you double your price on your cheapest items: $10/$15 up to $20/$30. If you sell 50% less products, your not losing a cent.

Personally, I was scared to boost my price from $5/mo to $8/mo at a time I was making about $500/mo. I am now getting less monthly subscriptions, but it better incentivized my yearly pricing @$60/year. My customer life-time value is jumping up from $20 to $30 and my monthly income has increased substantially.

If I were you, I'd simplify pricing and raise all your themes to two prices, maybe $20 and $40. And then create a pack for all of them for like $99 and specify the value (a $300 value).

This is awesome!

So re: "raising prices", I was scared to do this at first for my digital product but I ran small experiments over the course of a few months where I raised the price by a dollar or two (it's an ebook) to see if that would negatively impact sales; and it hadn't. To your point, price also communicates a "perception of quality" and having things really low may give the prospective buyer the idea that the quality isn't as high or that you're new to building themes. As long as you've done the market research to understand the possible price ranges of themes and how they correlate with quality, I wouldn't be afraid of raising your prices. Best of luck!

No, it's more of a psychological effect.

When people see low prices, they think of it as something of low quality product while if you raise it they think it's a product worth buying

Usually for bootstrapping, you start off with somewhat semi-decent pricing and you raise it up as you go along.

It all depends on several factors:

• if your product is very important for your users
• if the price is adequate (with a given value)
• if your product is popular (and you have many users and their number is growing continuously)

If some parameter answers "no" I would think more. Like if your price is already pretty high, or if your product is not popular enough, or if your product is not very important. You can do it anyway and just revert it back if it doesn't work.

Why not do A/B testing for optimal pricing?

Google Optimize is a free platform which you can use for this. Also, pricing and value people perceive from it can also depend on location and other parameters. So, it would be great if you set up a test for this.

Raising prices is the best indicator to see if customers are valuing your product.

If your themes are still under $50, I would add an experimental price of $199 to see what happens. Perhaps make it lifetime or for unlimited sites etc. Thats a great way for theme sellers (.e.g. Divi has a lifetime offer which is amazing for freelancers etc).

Yes, you were priced too low. The thing I noticed, acting like your average prospective customer who will look up your page for 1 min, is that prices are all over the place and I dont know at first sight why. I am sure that it makes perfect sense to you, but you al so know the important one here is the potential customer.