[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is "contact us for pricing" a dark pattern?
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Ask HN: Is "contact us for pricing" a dark pattern?
Some companies have simple products with no explicit pricing. When
I call them, there is no custom or bespoke aspects of the pricing
and they simply quote me a price. Why didn't they just put it on
their website?
Author : valdagger
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-02-15 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Sometimes there's no good reason, but the common case is:
|
| It ensures you are captured as a lead and establishes a human
| connection. Serious buyers have no problem getting on the phone.
|
| The fixed price you were quoted is a starting point for
| negotiation. It's the "book price", aka the chump price. You're
| leaving money on the table if you're not haggling with them or
| finding a way to get a better deal.
|
| Enterprise culture is to negotiate price. They have purchasing
| teams - multiple people whose entire job is to get a better deal
| than whatever is listed on the website or the first number quoted
| over the phone.
|
| These people are hard nosed and have zero problems calling for a
| price. A good purchaser on a big enough deal would rather hunt
| down your sales team on linkedin and start talking than accept a
| list price on your website.
|
| As an aside:
|
| How many people would hang a sign around their neck with a fixed
| price when looking for non-contract employment?
|
| How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a
| sale?
|
| Fixed prices are in some ways the anomaly; haggling mostly
| disappears when the cost of negotiation exceeds the benefit of
| price discrimination and products and customers are fungible.
|
| Personally I love fixed prices but most business does not work
| like that.
| grumple wrote:
| I think it's a bad marketing technique. As a developer, I'm asked
| to evaluate competing technologies all the time and pick one. I
| can see what your competitors charge. "Contact us for pricing"
| means you're out of the running. I know, it's a sales technique,
| but it's one that just cost you business.
|
| The business execs that I'd have to involve to contact you for
| pricing are, firstly - cheap, secondly - are probably going to
| outnegotiate you, thirdly - introduces a whole level of
| complexity to the process that I'd rather just pick your
| competitor and ask for approval.
| antonyh wrote:
| There's no trickery, they just want contact details to get you
| into the sales funnel. It's a strategy, and just because there's
| no custom/bespoke pricing for you doesn't mean they wouldn't cut
| a deal for hundreds or thousands of users.
|
| That said, I'm shocked they'd do this for a simple product
| selling a single item. It wouldn't be worth the time spent on the
| phone.
| rotoole wrote:
| Yes, this means the business model is based on extracting
| whatever they can get from you.
| motohagiography wrote:
| When I'm looking for pricing, I'm looking for order of magnitude,
| and enterprise sales guys want me to invest hours of meetings
| just to get that because it's an investment/sunk cost to them,
| but as an architect, it's really just a question of "does this
| scale in single digit multiples of $10, $100, $1,000 $10,000, or
| $100,000?" and I don't want to sit through what some of us have
| come to call their stupid time-share presentation.
|
| But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to
| their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue,
| but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales
| pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales
| person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18
| months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability
| of that revenue landing.
|
| By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of
| information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that
| improves the perception of their performance numbers,
| independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you
| are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go
| into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding
| to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say
| something or add information that will collapse the superposition
| of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more
| stable state.
|
| My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre
| political intrigues that are divorced from features and product
| qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So,
| tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as
| it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void.
|
| I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though.
| asdff wrote:
| Oh yes it is. In my field, usually that means purchasing requires
| dealing with some fast speaking salesperson to 'hook you up' with
| their great deal so they can get a nice commission and you get an
| inflated price just within the maximum budget you've earmarked.
| It's straight out of the used car salesman playbook, trying to
| size up your mark to see how much juice you can squeeze out of
| them. If pricing was done logically scaled to some size, it would
| just be listed as such. If I see "call for price" or something
| like that, I spend earnest effort looking for a competitor that
| deals with me straight without having my contact info first.
| codegeek wrote:
| Can you clarify a bit more ? Are you saying you call these
| companies and they just give you a price for Item X without
| asking you any questions ? Are you saying it is a commodity
| product/service that has no variation at all depending on your
| needs ?
| soared wrote:
| ITT: Nobody who has ever been involved in enterprise purchasing
| and decision making.
|
| When my employer (only ~300 people) switched to salesforce it
| took 3 years from when we started looking at vendors to
| completing the switch. Buying software at this level is not just
| adding it to your cart, its creating a project that will take up
| huge chunks of dev time. Its a discussion between parties, and
| the price (contract) takes months of work to agree on.
|
| We hired a consultant literally just for redlining.
| https://blog.pandadoc.com/what-is-contract-redlining-and-con...
|
| Just because you can implement easily does not mean 90% of the
| vendor's customers can.
| cloudking wrote:
| It's mostly relevant for enterprise customers, even if you have
| pricing for them listed they will not just sign up for your
| service. Enterprise deals involve many steps: demos,
| negotiations, contracts, trials, security reviews etc. You would
| want them to contact you to get this process started.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I don't know about dark pattern, but I do know that in most
| cases, I am so averse to negotiating that I'd rather do without
| the product/service than reach out to ANYONE to talk about
| pricing.
| ksec wrote:
| It Depends. If your target customer are large Business or
| Enterprise, then it is a great filter.
| kangnkodos wrote:
| I once read that you can sell software to companies for under
| $100 or over $100,000, but not for anything in between. If a
| salesman is required, perhaps to customize the order, you end up
| on the expensive side. That side also has "contact us for
| pricing".
|
| The same idea applies when selling other products to companies,
| with slightly different dollar thresholds.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I skip anything that doesn't tell me the pricing terms up front.
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance.
|
| "A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully
| crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying
| overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for
| recurring bills"."[0]
|
| By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a
| pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern.
| It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor
| about what you're trying to achieve.
|
| Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for
| enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually
| have lots of people on your team who want different things. You
| might have special requirements for your industry. You probably
| need to sign a contract for special provisions or services.
|
| Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to
| learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you
| seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and
| add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same
| idea.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
| ignoramous wrote:
| It all comes down to whether it's a product-led or sales-led
| company.
|
| Product-led companies usually have plans for all usage sizes
| including custom plans for large enterprises.
|
| Sales-led almost always don't want to be in business with the
| long-tail of the market. That sales call is their way of
| effectively filtering those customers out.
|
| see also: https://blog.close.com/product-led-sales-led-
| marketing-led/
| flax wrote:
| By that definition it _is_ a dark pattern. The thing people are
| being tricked into doing is divulging contact info/interest
| even if they're not going to buy at the eventually revealed
| price.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Also, the act of filling out a form may cause them to give
| undue weight to the product since there has been an
| "investment" made after submitting. So that is another way
| the pattern tricks you.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but I think there are forms of this
| that I would definitely consider dark patterns -
|
| The one that immediately jumps to mind is "Add this item to
| your cart to see the price".
|
| There's no good intention there, just manipulation. The
| statistics show a user is more likely to buy an item after
| adding it to their cart, and this forces them to do that before
| revealing pertinent information to the user.
|
| ---
|
| Basically - If it's not a solution that can be customized to
| the user/customer, I find hiding the price is almost always a
| dark pattern.
|
| If it is a solution that can be customized, it may or may not
| be a dark pattern, but I still tend to avoid companies that do
| this - it often means they want additional information from me,
| or that they're hoping additional sales and marketing
| information will make me less price sensitive before showing me
| the final price.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Showing a price after an item is in the cart can be a
| contract hack around pricing contracts with manufacturers or
| distributors, where you're not able to directly advertise
| your "best" price.
| irscott wrote:
| Most of the time this is referred to as a MAP agreement and
| companies can be real aggressive in enforcing them.
| humbledrone wrote:
| While the "add to cart to see price" pattern may be dark,
| it's worth noting that the retail seller that makes you do
| this is probably not the party who's responsible for the
| pattern. It turns out that some manufacturers make the
| retailer agree to not advertise a price lower than MSRP. But,
| though they cannot /advertise/ a price below MSRP, they can
| /sell/ at a price below MSRP. I guess it's generally accepted
| that showing you a different price after you've added the
| item to your cart doesn't technically count as "advertising"
| the lower price.
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/online-shopping/why-do-i-
| hav...
| neltnerb wrote:
| I almost only see this for very expensive non-commodity
| products. I think in these industries the vendors at least
| believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they do it
| person-to-person over the phone. I don't know if they're right
| or not, when I see that my first step is to look for other
| vendors.
|
| But I think that they simply believe that they are more likely
| to make a sale if they screen for only people interested enough
| to submit a request for a quote. That's not really a dark
| pattern, yeah. It's not a trick, they just don't want to sell
| stuff that way.
|
| Vici-Valco is the most confusing one to me for this, but I
| believe for them it's to create a barrier to keep small time
| orders _out_. Basically, I don 't think that they make much
| money on me ordering ten compression fittings so if they make
| it too easy to find prices and order stuff without human
| intervention they'd spend proportionally more time on small
| clients? It's odd, I mean, they do have a catalog and the
| catalog has prices. It's just super hard to order online or
| find pricing otherwise.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| There's a vendor I deal with that does something like this.
| They have an online catalog and prices are listed, but to buy
| something, I have to email them and then they respond with a
| link to their fulfillment partner.
|
| At first I thought it was really dumb, because they're in a
| technology sector and deal with engineers all the time. Why
| not just take me to a shopping cart? But then I got an email
| that said something like "HeyLaughingBoy, I noticed you
| bought 5 units of $SENSOR in July and another 10 units in
| August. Would you like to discuss volume prices going
| forward? We can scale the price to your estimated annual
| volume..."
|
| I thought it was a great idea to get a dialog going with
| someone who looks small time (me) but could become a major
| customer. This way, they build a relationship with me before
| I just start looking for someone cheaper as my sales grow. If
| they just listed prices at preset volume levels, that would
| never happen.
| hctaw wrote:
| It's more about charging prices based on what customers are
| willing to pay rather than a fixed price. In B2B sales you
| can swing much higher prices from bigger clients for the same
| thing, but that's harder if they know what you charge smaller
| businesses.
| _wldu wrote:
| People talk. I'm in a specific industry and on a lot of
| industry specific mailing lists. When companies charge some
| of us extra, everyone quickly learns about it and that ends
| up making the vendor look bad and makes everyone in the
| industry seek alternatives.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| Maybe it is really many possible product combinations presented
| as a comprehensive product or maybe they don't even have a
| product..
|
| I'm sorry but what is a dark pattern if that doesn't qualify?
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I agree with this answer. While I don't like the approach, I
| don't think it's a dark pattern. I applaud your effort to
| distinguish them, though; diluting words by overloading them is
| a disservice to language.
| ozim wrote:
| I hate it because it is used as a tool to find out "how much we
| can make that sucker pay" which is adversarial approach instead
| of partnership. So in the end it is device to sell me
| overpriced service.
|
| There are pricing pages that have price x, price y and
| "enterprise contact us". So maybe vendor that has only "contact
| us" is selling only to F500 and I am not a customer for them.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a dark pattern. It's more like an archaic
| sales tactic, but I guess it still works. It's the old "How Much
| Money Do You Have?" pricing scheme [1].
|
| They're either getting income/revenue information that's
| connected in some way to the number you called from, or you're
| providing just enough information to enable them to quote a
| particular price for you.
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
| rubber-...
| nyerp wrote:
| A startup doesn't necessarily want everyone to know its pricing.
| They might be happy to let potential customers know, but not
| competitors, family and friends, customers' clients and
| suppliers, the press, etc. Making people contact the company lets
| the startup screen inquiries. And competitors aren't likely to
| have the gall to ask.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I generally just assume it means "I can't afford this".
| ouid wrote:
| Absolutely. Try to imagine how much different the world would be
| if, for instance, job listings were required to post their
| compensation exactly.
| codegeek wrote:
| I prefer ranges. Not all candidates are same even for the same
| job. If I hire an A player, I may give them a bit more to
| sweeten the deal. If I hire a B player (who is good enough for
| the role but is not an A player so far), I would negotiate the
| compensation a little early on as long as it is something the
| candidate B accepts.
|
| Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the
| range is 65k-85K, then its fair game to say that the best
| candidate may get 85K but a good enough may only get 65K or say
| 70K. Also as a candidate if you are looking for 100K min, you
| know this position is not for you.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I've never understood this logic, can't you just create
| different roles?
| nicoburns wrote:
| What if the candidate applies to the wrong one, but would
| be suitable for a different one. At that point it's not
| much different to just having a range on their in the first
| place.
| endisneigh wrote:
| it's completely different - Google for example will down
| level you based on performance. if you have candidates
| that have the same job with wildly different salaries
| which just exacerbates arbitrary inequities. the range
| solution also creates problems when handling promotions
|
| the one who benefits the most from the "range" solution
| is the employer, really.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > if you have candidates that have the same job with
| wildly different salaries
|
| How do you classify something as the same job versus a
| different job though? Two developers may have roughly
| similar responsibilities but one may be much better than
| the other. And it would be reasonable to pay them more in
| those circumstances, but it's very hard to quantify that
| objectively.
|
| Also, Google is a huge company so they can advertise 5
| jobs at different levels and fill them all. Whereas
| smaller companies may want someone and not be too sure
| about what level they need: it may depend more on who
| they can get. They can't afford to be too picky.
| asdff wrote:
| What I don't like about this is that people really aren't A
| players or B players in practice. It's not a video game, real
| life is messy. In some situations, a B player can be an A
| player, and vice versa. Past performance does not indicate
| future results, and in my experience usually the best worker
| is the one who has simply been given a chance and the freedom
| to self optimize their job for some months, and rarely are
| they the most qualified applicant. No one is good at their
| job on day one nor should they be expected to be.
|
| There are too many confounding variables involved with the
| very abstract concept of 'work effort,' for it to be reliably
| used. Instead, set a price for the role, and if someone is
| exceeding their anticipated productivity and putting more
| work on their back, give them a raise.
| true_religion wrote:
| I think if you're at the level of A or B player, then
| you're already at the top of the field. There's a lot more
| letters in the alphabet, and a lot more difference in
| experience that people can have.
|
| My company for example will hire F players. We'll even hire
| G or H players too. Those are the roles that we are
| actually hiring for when we open up an entry level job.
| However if a C player comes along, naive and fresh out of a
| masters program, we'll also snap them up and pay an
| absolutely _exorbitant_ rate compared to the normal salary
| range for their position because we want them to stay for
| at least 5 years. In 5 years, if they improve they 'll be A
| or B players and we'll bump them into _Director_ level
| roles in the hope that they will stay due to the
| responsibility and freedom the role offers even though we
| can 't pay Google-level salaries.
|
| Having a posted initial salary will just scare off a
| candidate who is unnaturally good versus the rest of the
| local market.
|
| Disclaimer:
|
| I like to think I am/was a solid C rated developer. If you
| are an A player, I bow to your wisdom. I have never applied
| to FAANG. I know I wouldn't make even the phone cut.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| I've gotten multiple jobs in life where I was able to negotiate
| a much larger salary then they had intended to pay due to being
| of more worth to them once they interviewed me.
|
| So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that
| people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more
| or less for a posting based on the person they choose.
| ouid wrote:
| I think you're guilty of falling prey to the "decoy effect"
| here. The labor market is a carnival, and they're selling
| tokens to you. You can buy 25 tokens for 10 dollars or 15
| tokens for 5 dollars. The latter strategy is locally optimal,
| and you are using that as an argument for it's global
| optimality. That's exactly the point of the con though.
| Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use
| whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| No, he's not. That's what gets lost in the shuffle in
| discussions like this. _He_ is saying it works for _him_
| and like it or not, that 's what the vast majority of
| people care about. What's In It For Me?
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use
| whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.
|
| Workers also do not want to work cheaper than they can get,
| and last I checked, there's over 5 million companies in the
| US, and plenty of evidence that those companies are
| competing for labor.
|
| So they do bid on labor. If a company does not match it's
| competitors, employees move. And a company has every
| incentive to pay more than competitors, up to the break
| even point, since it gets them better employees.
|
| Even if a few companies collude, it open the door for a
| competitor to break ranks and steal employees. This
| breaking of ranks is prevalent in all sorts of cartels
| around the world - it's nearly impossible to make companies
| stick to an agreement when by breaking it they can gain
| advantage over rivals.
|
| The carnival metaphor makes little sense. Employees and
| employers are in a market trading goods, nothing more,
| nothing less.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I don't remember where, but once I read an article saying
| something like "If Space-X can have price calculator right on
| their side, so can your shitty SaaS solution."
| is_true wrote:
| That's really shortsighted. A SaaS company could meet an amount
| of new requirements that I'm sure SpaceX can't.
| chrismatheson wrote:
| Sure, but they could also give me some idea of what the core
| product costs without my specific tweaks
| habitue wrote:
| As others have said, it's an old sales tactic that benefits the
| seller. You'll see it mostly in places where:
|
| 1. There's not much competition for the product, so the seller
| has no reason to compete on price and make things easy to compare
|
| 2. The sales process / cycle for that industry requires so many
| stakeholders and agreements etc that pre-committing to a price
| range up front is just an unnecessary handicap. They'll be in
| negotiations with numerous executives with a prospective buyer
| potentially for years before getting a signature. In these
| situations the buyer is not a naive consumer, they're a
| corporation that can take care of themselves and giving out the
| price is a free point in that game.
|
| 3. They haven't sold anything yet. They are still in the research
| phase and are feeling out what people might pay.
| willcate wrote:
| Bothers me too. I think it's a weasel-y move because it forces
| the customer to start a convo at an information-disadvantage.
| qeternity wrote:
| I see a lot of answers about how it enables companies to charge
| more. That's true, but it also enables companies to charge less.
| It's all about price discrimination, and it's not a bad thing.
|
| Without this you either end up with one of two scenarios.
| Scenario 1: companies price extremely high on paper and then
| negotiate down afterwards, as happens in the US health insurance
| markets, and it's a nightmare. Or scenario 2 the producer ends up
| pricing for their profit maximizing volume, which at constant
| price means customers who realize greater utility are subsidized
| by those who realize the least utility.
|
| Consider a very real example: AWS charges outrageous markups on
| bandwidth. This is because many organizations realize far greater
| value from the AWS ecosystem and are willing to pay. This prices
| out people who are more price sensitive, and means they end up
| using a competitor, even if Amazon would happily sell them
| bandwidth at a lower price. They simply can't without
| canibalizing their fatter customers.
|
| I've negotiated services for startups at a fraction of the cost
| of what larger companies are paying (on the order of 90% less)
| because of this dark pattern.
| fab1an wrote:
| No, in fact you should consider it a relevant signal contributing
| to the UX of a site: if you're appalled by seeing this on a site,
| you are vrey very likely not a good fit for them and vice versa.
| max_ wrote:
| It's to give worse prices to customers that are not good at
| negotiating.
| jldupont wrote:
| This practice is to enable suppliers to perform "value based
| pricing" i.e. adapt their price according to how much you want /
| need their offer.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Rule of thumb: Assume any SAAS company with a "Contact us for
| pricing" will cost at least $20k per year.
|
| If your price point is much less than this you should probably
| just have users self-service with a credit card.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Right. I treat "contact us for pricing" as the corporate
| equivalent of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
| dabbledash wrote:
| I don't think it's a dark pattern, but it makes me much much less
| likely to buy.
| is_true wrote:
| It depends, I live in a country with a lot of regulations and
| inflation. I would've to change prices every week. I do it
| because I have a platform that allows me to, but not everyone has
| as much data.
|
| On the other hand, we offer a custom plan that has a contact us
| for pricing button. Because in that plan we are gonna do whatever
| we can to add as much value as possible for your business. Mostly
| integrations and updates on legacy systems.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| No, it is not. Go listen to the Planet Money episode about why
| old veterans hate the red cross. When you don't have enough
| information to set price well, you can do a ton of damage to your
| company by setting it too low. It's not always a "great strategy"
| but it's not a dark pattern in and of itself.
| Daho0n wrote:
| You shouldn't call them and find something else. It's a money
| grab.
| meowster wrote:
| Yes it is a money grab, but there are industries where every
| player does this, so you have no choice but to play their game
| if you want in.
| llarsson wrote:
| Enterprises often want your solution to integrate with so many
| other pieces of software that you are firmly out of "list prices"
| territory and very much in "let's design a solution that fits all
| these unique needs... and also has to run on-prem, because of
| this or that regulation" one, instead.
|
| If your needs are served by the standard packages and you want to
| hook the thing up to your Slack for notifications, that's super.
| There is a pricing plan for that.
|
| If you need basically a full year's worth of effort to hook this
| service up to your environment, and you want the experts involved
| with doing this integration, there's a kind of pricing plan for
| that, too.
|
| The latter just does not look reasonable on a web page, because
| it starts with "it depends" and scales (non-?)linearly.
| Amin3456 wrote:
| How to Take Care of Betta Fish
|
| https://bit.ly/2Zqahul
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Not only are they trying to obscure pricing (the ideal pricing
| scheme for any good for the seller is to maximize what EACH
| customer is willing to pay), they are trying to increase your
| "sunken cost fallacy" switching cost by engaging in a long drawn
| out sales process.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| It is a transparently obnoxious pattern, unless you are buying
| something expensive and highly customisable.
| detaro wrote:
| If there truly is no meaningful exchange of details before giving
| a price, pretty much yes. (although tbh even "who is the client"
| can be relevant - few people are going to put "in our experience
| companies in industry X are always a pain to work with and cause
| more support needs, and thus we'll bill higher" on the website,
| but if you have few high-value contracts that's a relevant
| concern. Not so much if you sell many small things.)
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(page generated 2021-02-15 23:02 UTC)