Which one is actually better?

So here's an interesting thought experiment.

Let's say you need a new wicket. You know that one company sells a wicket for $15, and another company sells a wicket for $30. Either company can have it delivered to your door in 24 hours. There are no pictures, no product description, and no customer reviews available. All you know is the price.

Which one do you order? Which one do you think most people would order?

Surprisingly, it's a lot closer to an even split than you might assume. You see, while a lot of people are always looking for a bargain, there are quite a lot of people who are suspicious of a price that's lower for no apparent reason - to them, price is tied to quality, so a lower price always denotes an inferior product.

And let's be honest... that's often the case. If you get three quotes from three different plumbers for a job, and one of them comes in with a quote that's a thousand dollars less than the other two, you'll immediately be suspicious. Is he not as good as the other two? Does he use cheap materials? Or did he grossly underestimate the amount of labor required? Chances are, most people would choose one of the other two plumbers. And those who did choose the lower price quote might not be happy with the result. But how do we know for sure, without more information?

Time Magazine wrote an article about a very interesting study from the Journal of Consumer Research back in 2012 (sample here, full JCR issue available for purchase). The study examined how consumers could draw two opposite conclusions from the same limited information, and how subtle changes in the way the information was presented had a huge impact on which conclusion was reached more frequently.

Black Friday shoppers are primed for weeks or even months leading up to the actual event with ads touting the amazing deals and huge discounts they can expect. You'll almost never see words like "quality" or "reliability" used in those ads. This is conditioning the consumers to focus their attention solely on the price, and it's a very effective strategy. On the other hand, luxury products spend most of their advertising energy talking about their superior quality. If there's any mention of price at all, it's in the context of not trusting or not being able to depend on the "cheaper" products. These two methods of presenting limited information both sway peoples' opinions of products without ever bringing actual statistics, measurements, or feature lists into play.

So that's what people expect. Cheaper is inferior. More expensive means better quality. But what if the assumptions are wrong? What if the more expensive product is only more expensive because the company can get away with it? What if they've tricked their customers into thinking their product is better than the competition by telling a good story, or even outright lying about how difficult or time consuming it is to develop their product? What if the company charging less is the only one charging a fair price for the amount of work required, instead of as much as they can possibly get away with?

Even here in Pictou County, there are companies that want you to believe it costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to build a simple website, or that it's perfectly normal to spend hundreds of dollars a month hosting your website on their servers. That simple changes like removing some unwanted text from a page takes hours of work (at over a hundred dollars an hour!) and has to go into a queue to await resolution by an expert technician. I've worked with several customers in the past year that came from other website builders or web hosting companies that charged them huge fees to build crappy, ugly, 2 page websites that took literally an hour to reproduce, or who charged over $300 a month for hosting services on a website that had less than a thousand visitors a month and almost no storage space requirements. The fact of the matter is, some companies charge a fortune for any computer related services, because computers are an area that a lot of consumers don't know about and are intimidated by.

Maybe the stereotypes are too hard to overcome. Maybe I can't convince you that more expensive isn't always better. But hopefully, I've at least given you something to think about. Before you commit to something as important to your business as your website, ask questions. Do some research. Don't make assumptions.

And hey, if you've already got a website or web hosting, and feel like you might be paying too much... I know a guy who can help you.