You open a website. First you check the design... It's pretty nice, filled with smooth animations that bring life to the page. The font family is also very friendly, and you feel comfortable reading the texts. You finish reading everything, but... What you were searching was not there. "Ok, cool... Usually the home page doesn't have this kind of information", you think. You are searching for prices: you want to know how much you have to pay for the service. So you see a tab saying 'Prices'. "Great! I found it!" But...
You click there and a new page opens. Some more animations, and the content is ready to be read. But, where the f**k are the prices? You clicked on this tab, but there are lots of other links and... No prices! So you start reading: "Basic Plan, to now the price click here...", "Professional Plan, to know the price click here...", "Ultimate Plan, to know the price call us at...". Then you click on the first link... Another page! Without prices! Instead, you see millions of advantages of the Basic Plan. You read why you should buy it, how it's gonna improve your life, and you also realize there is this message "To have a better experience, check our Professional and Ultimate Plan". So you close the website. Simple as that. You didn't find the information you need, you go to another similar website and search there.
I've also seen several retail websites showing in their products, instead of the price, a link "Click here to see the price". I, personally, hate this... They are adding a useless step on the client's purchase process. And sometimes they are losing clients (like me). From that, we can learn two simple (yet useful) things.
Show the information your customer wants to see!
If you are hiding it, it's because it's not good. If you have to hide the price to get some more clicks, then the price is not competitive. You should change the price instead of hiding it. You have two different perspectives: the company, that wants bigger profits, and the client, that wants cheap products. You, as a company, must (read it? MUST) look through the eye of the (tige...) customer. What is more important: to sell few over priced products or lots of under priced ones? Of course the second one, right? Besides, your customer will come back to you to look for different products when needed. That's cool, isn't it?
But how about the first case? The "Basic Plan" one? The customer might want to see what are the benefits of choosing you, right? Hmm... That's true, but... The price is also part of this benefits (usually the most important one). You have to understand one thing: the price must not scare the customer. It must be a plus to your product, not a minus. And you don't need to put thousands of benefits... Don't waste your time trying to find and create benefits that don't really exist. And don't waste your customer's time making him read it. Keep it simple, dude... If you don't have enough benefits, the problem is with you and you have to optimize your product. As simple as that. Got it?
Reduce the clicks and the path
Instead of taking your customer to a journey throughout your website, make it simple. Every single page should be reachable with one, maximum two clicks. A lean structure is your best option. The less the clicks, the less customers you lose.
Also, creating a lean structure allows the crawling robots (the guys responsible for finding your website and putting it in search engines) to find and link your pages easier. If you have many links, it may get confusing for them (because they are robots, not humans...) and they might skip some pages when indexing your website. So... reducing the clicks also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Cool? I think that's it... Keep your website simple and show what matters to your user!
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