A few weeks ago, Christian Mairoll of Emsi Software posted on the ASP forums about an interesting experiment he tried. He replaced all .99 and .95 prices (often called “odd prices”) with rounded prices. He reported that for him it made no difference. Interesting…
So I tried it myself. Last week I started an A/B split test on this. Group A getting my regular .95 pricing, group B getting rounded prices. But for me, it did make a difference. Here’s my results after 8 days:
For rounded pricing:
- Downloads: down 5.2%
- Sign-ups: down 3.6%
- Sales: down 5.8%
- Average First Purchase Value: same
- Profits: down 5.9%
These are the results for just over 28,000 first time visitors and a total of 260 sales (A vs B -> 135 vs 125).
Statistically speaking, this is not enough data to be confident that odd pricing works better.
But still, I don’t think rounded pricing is ever going to cause a substantial improvement in profits for me. So I stopped the test today.
My wife has the “annoying” habit of just seeing 0’s instead of 9’s or 5’s in the price. I’m the one that has to constantly correct her – no that’s not 200 dollars, that’s 300! Some people I just don’t think give as much weight to the proceeding numbers, so when they see the 2 in front they automatically think 200 bucks. Strange.
I’ve read other studies that said .99 results in more sales than 1.00.
I’d be interested to see the difference between .99 and .95. I personally prefer .95 but I wonder what effect it has?