Hide price in B2B ecommerce?

A large number of market research studies have seen an ever-increasing B2B customers' need to be engaged by suppliers through digital and self-service channels.

For example, by 2025 Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers to occur in digital channels. B2B buying behaviors have been shifting toward a buyer-centric digital model, a change that has been accelerated the past couple of years. Millennials, the first digital natives, are now decision makers and are far more skeptical of sales reps than their predecessors.

60% of B2B sales organizations are going to transform from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales processes, applications, data and analytics into a single operational practice. And 33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience.

But... Every time I approached together with salespersons the designing of a customer experience through the buyer journey on an B2B e-business platform, the question that I was very often asked was: Should we hide our prices from the customers?

Many B2B e-business do not display prices because they do not want their competitors and distributors to know the price of what they are selling.

B2B pricing is a bit complex to set and requires careful consideration. While B2C buyers tending to make purchases emotionally, B2B buyers are more specific and follow a planned and structured approach to purchasing. In B2B, buyer-specific detail matters more than in B2C. The focus is not just on impulse buying but on building long-term relationships with customers. Thus, B2B ecommerce need to set the pricing right for every customer to maintain their relationship and continue to drive sales. Especially in the industry sectors, for a B2B customer who orders a large number of products, offering the personalized price with a reasonable discount rate is a must. Hide price would give more chances to discuss for an appropriate price, or (and why not?) even to increase the request to subscribe to reserved area on the e-shop to see the customized prices. Moreover, many B2B e-business platforms do not display prices because they do not want their competitors and/or distributors to know the price of what they are selling (is this really the case?).

There are some other advantages to hide prices on B2B ecommerce platforms. For example, by hiding the product price, we can also limit the chance of customers being caught up by surprise when seeing a noticeable price change. Hiding prices can also create opportunities for our business to increase customer experience through consulting, thereby improving and enhancing customer relationships. In addition to that, by hiding price customers who take a look at the product webpage would put their notice into product information, features and benefits instead of only the price. Fact is that many customers get help up at the landing page and take a leave right after seeing the price - and it seems a waste of potential.

The future of sales is moving from a seller-centric to a buyer-centric digital model. And this also means more data for a customized and digitalized B2B buyer experience.

Nevertheless, there are many disadvantages of hide price for B2B ebusiness.

As business customers learn and buy more online, unflattering comparisons to advanced digital platforms are unavoidable. The strategy of hiding prices on B2B ecommerce platforms can affect the bottom line negatively and B2B buyers ignore the offering right away. Not providing B2B buyers with personalized pricing is the worst thing we can do for our B2B eCommerce business. So, the best way to tackle this problem is by displaying a starting price. In this way, customers will know whether the products are within their budget or not and competitors will never know the actual prices. In this way we can also have the opportunity to increase the number of requests to reserved area, where personalized prices are visible after login, so that we can collect more customer data in order to customize the online buyer experience (pre- and aftersales).

We should not forget that increased digital buying means more data. Increased digital activity and information storage systems means more, and more detailed, data on customer behavior and product usage patterns. However, few sales organizations can yet capture, organize, clean and query that data systematically — or use it to deploy even rudimentary machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI). The future of sales is the permanent transformation of organizations’ sales strategies, processes and allocation of resources, moving from a seller-centric to a buyer-centric orientation. A B2B digital commerce strategy is essential and includes a website positioned as a fully-fledged, self-service sales channel integrated with and complementing other sales channels.

We should always ask ourselves if the price is a real benefit for our customers.

Competing on price is the most straightforward way in which sellers can compete for customers, because people usually prefer to pay less. But the pressure on prices is usually a not winning strategy, especially for innovative and technologically advanced industrial products or for customized services and solutions which are required by the industrial B2B world. If we adopt a customer-centric mindset, we should always ask ourselves if the price is a real benefit for our customers, and so we can answer the question if we should show the prices on our e-commerce platform. If we focus on the user experience and customer benefits, perhaps the question of whether or not to show prices even becomes unnecessary...