The Power of the Price Match

The other day I penned an e-mail introducing our Recession Buster Pricing that went out to all our customers. In that e-mail I called attention to one specific product that we offer here at Solid Cactus, our Price Match Request. In a nutshell, this product puts a button or a link on your individual item pages that allows customers who find that item at a lower price to fill out a brief form requesting that you either meet or beat the competitors price.

This particular product was built specifically for us when we owned 39 pet supply websites. Pet supplies are a price oriented purchase and competition is fierce with everyone trying to sell the lowest cost bag of pig ears. We would spend tons of money advertising online and in print to drive customers to our sites and it was foolish for us to turn them away because some items were priced 50-cents higher than our competition.

Our price match policy was simple, fill out the form, tell us who the competitor is and how much they want for the item, if we can match it, we will and give you a buck off your total order. In the end, the price match feature did two things for us, one, it got a customer who normally would have went elsewhere to make a purchase from us and two, it alerted us to an item we needed to take a look at to make sure it was priced properly and check on what the rest of the competition was charging.

The cost to acquire a customer is expensive and you plan on making that money back on repeat orders. The cost to NOT acquire a customer because of a pricing issue is even MORE expensive - you’re not only losing the first order, you’re losing the chance of having that customer make multiple purchases from you in the future.

I read an article today where the headline reads “retail sales expected to decline as discount shopping become the name of the game for most consumers.” Lets face it, the economy sucks. Every e-tailer/retailer is looking to gain a piece of what little money customers are spending - and you should be too. The first step to capture some of that money is to establish a price match policy that is not overly complex and doesn’t cause the customer to become so confused they click away. Sure it’s extra work on your end to get the policy in place, but capturing every sale is important, isn’t it?