How to present a “good deal”

Ever heard of psychological pricing? It’s a clever strategy that involves setting prices in a way that triggers subconscious reactions in customers and makes them more likely to buy.

One popular trick is called “price anchoring”, which works on the basis that people tend to rely heavily on the first price they see when making decisions.

Imagine a salesperson showing you a laptop that’s priced at R55,000 (the anchor). Then they reveal another laptop that’s priced at R40,000, which suddenly seems like a fantastic deal. You’re more inclined to buy the second laptop just because you saw the price of the first one.

There’s also a tactic known as “charm pricing”. It’s about ending prices with odd numbers like 7 or 9. Why? Well, this taps into something called “left-digit bias”. Our brains tend to focus on the first digit of a price, so prices ending in “7” or “9” can trick us into rounding down in our minds.

Studies have proven that prices like R599 can attract more buyers than round numbers like R600. Even though R599 is just one Rand less, our minds round it down to R500, so it seems like a better deal. Yes, I get that this is not entirely logical. But, neither are people.

Here’s the article that inspired this article: https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/ecommerce/psychological-pricing.shtml