Business Thread: Membership price ending and conversions (.95 vs .99 cents)
 

Based on research these cent figures produce an effect in consumer behaviour:
00, 50, 69, 77, 88, 90, 94, 95, 99 cents

Examples:

.00 - used for premium good effect (E.g. Gold/VIP membership)

.99 - used for discount effect (best value / special offer)

.69 - research: lowered price from 89 cents to 71 cents, sales volume increased a mere
65%, lowered from 89 to 69 cents, sales volume increased by 222%!!!

.77 - in one study, the perceived value of all the numbers between 1 and 100 were studied, and 77 was shown to have the lowest perceived value relative to its actual value.

Has anyone researched this in practice? I see most adult sites use .95 as price ending, is this a limitation of the CC processors? Match.com uses .99 cents (they used to be .95) and some use .94 cents

If the change between 88 to 69 was 222% then this is a factor that should be looked into.

We've been "self-testing" sign-up pages today with different cent amounts and imho they really do make a strong psychological difference.

here is a secret about porn, the surfer either wants it or he dont a few cents wont make a difference, I tested everything in the book, with regular products its a different story.

I agree, adult choice is a bit more... pressing, to ponder the cents, but looking at the signup page as a user, when you have $40 per month for 1 month and $25 per month for 3-month membership, user thinks - "$40 bucks, $25 bucks, no way", but when the sign-up page is "complicated up", e.g. "$39.95" and "$24.95" user thinks "they ain't fooling me with that 99 cent stuff, but it has 99 so it's cheap".... it's like the Ivan Pavlov's Dog experiment - they're conditioned to think .99 is cheap. And all major adult sites do use the .95 for membership price endings, even playboy which is not selling "cheap value product". Maybe 69 would be even better.

Seriously everyone who gets into this business including myself makes this mistake, we try to compare mainstream sales tactics with porn, it just dont work like that.

The guy joining a porn site has a hardon, noone joins a porn site to jerk off sometime in the coming month, the thinking is straight or:

A) they would notice those pre checked boxes that end up costing them 500 bucks, if they where at a mainstream site they would NEVER fall for it

B) They would not use their .mil or .gov or .edu or real name when joining, these are the same people that when the subscribe to the ny times online makeup a name and email address

And I can go on and on

I agree, but this can be a little extra for all those "undecided people"...

For example AFF switched pricing on some of their sites (passion.com) from .95 to .94 - user's sub-concious will not do the ".95 = it's a penny less, lets convert to closest full dollar value"

And on AFF the price endings for gold membership packages are now switched from .95 to .34 .83 and .69 - all numeric codes for sexual positions. (And all their package totals also end with .94)

And Match.com (not fully adult, but softcore close) switched all their membership price endings from .95 to .99 - more conditioned as "cheap/good value" price.

dating = not in jerk off mode, porn = jerk off mode, remember that

Great post man! Finnaly a decent biz thread!

Like EscortBiz said, everyone experiments with this when they first start a paysite, and the results rarely show an increase in sales. If the surfer likes your content he'll join whether it's a $1 trial or a $35 monthly signup, regardless of the cents afterwards.

Now one argument for the cent amount is masking it on the credit card bill so it doesn't look like an obvious porn membership :) Ie. odd prices like 33.67.

Exactly right.

Over 11 years, I have run a lot of different seasonal promo's, as well as discounts for longer, raised prices, done staggered plans where first month more, and longer rebill cheaper.

Never a complaint. They want it, or do not, and people will pay for it.

Just like on clip stores. People will pay $10.99 for a SINGLE CLIP when a membership to 900 clips is $29.95.

:2 cents:

My thinking is that from every 1,000,000 uniques it's $400k extra income for every 1% we can improve the ratio. So when changing .99 to .94 makes users think 3% less about math and 3% more with their dick, then it's an extra $1.2M in the bank.

The using obscure amounts to avoid detection on bank statements factor is also something I pondered - .99 .95 on statements would stand out as single item web (membership) payments... **.27 would be more obscure and could result in an extra month of unnoticed member retention.

Hence obscure price ending that causes an extra month of retention would result for average member retention a 20-30% extra which is 5-10 times more $ than any price ending would result from increases conversion. Agreed?

You are one of those people that made up your mind what you want to hear, so do as you think, I gave you advice based on real experience not what I think.

:2 cents:

Err, you lost me.

.81 is magic number, :)