A very typical message from someone on twitter…
Not typical because I only follow people who talk about pricing, and anyone who says I do is lying…
…but typical because fairness is a deeply ingrained norm in pricing, and you need to find out what your customers see as fair.
If you’re a lawyer, you estimate a job at £1200 and then it is much more complicated than you anticipated, you might think it’s fair to charge £2000 to reflect the extra time you have spent. Are you sure your customer agrees? (most won’t)
If you run an online electronics shop and you price a plasma TV at £129.99, then after 240 people order it you realise it was meant to be £1299.99, you might think it’s fair to invoke the “errors and omissions excepted” clause in your terms and conditions (which nobody has read) and cancel the orders. Your customers might not agree. If they don’t, you’ll probably hear about it many times over on blogs, twitter and maybe even from a new group of ex-customers.
Sometimes you might take the risk, increase the price and annoy the customer. It might be worth it. But it might not.
Whatever decision you come to, don’t get the worst of both worlds by getting angry, annoying your customer, and still selling the product at the cheaper price. Whoever the shopkeeper is in the above tweet, he’s probably lost £1.70 and a future customer. What a waste.