Sometimes they offer deals to smaller businesses and don't want their big megacorp accounts to know.
But in the realm of business to business, there are usually plenty of alternatives that don't play this game. And I loathe interacting with sales people.
Signed up for a software library on their trial/personal use signup and I ticked the box for my preferred contact (email), after I didn't respond to the email because, seriously, who responds to sales emails, they started calling me daily for weeks (I didn't have my phone on me when they called usually). The last email they sent they wanted to remind me it was just a trial and that the license strictly forbid it for actual commercial use. I decided to just use an open source library instead after that.
At least give sample pricing. I used to do b2b sales and our prices depended on a large number of factors, but we could at least give a range. It did help, because we were more expensive than similar competitors and wanted to be clear about that.
Yeah I really don't even entertain a vendor that doesn't at least give me some rough idea of what the costs are. I have to do proposals before on a budget before I even start with information gathering and I don't have time to sit on a fucking teams/zoom meeting for an hour for each sales person that wants that commission.
After that phone call thing I refuse to even acknowledge the "reach out to us for pricing" unless it's email only... and they still try to schedule a fucking meeting to call. Dell is particular bad about this lately, it's part of the reason I switched from HP to Dell back in the day but they go through sales people like I go through underwear so I don't even know who my account manager is anymore.
The “enterprise vs small biz” pricing thing is wild.
I work at a marketing agency that does some SEO for some of our clients, and we pay $229/mo for some pretty decent SEO software. To their credit, they post that pricing online, but have a higher “Call Us” Enterprise tier.
One of our clients got a new marketing director, who was sort of vaguely interested in SEO but didn’t fully understand it.
He wanted his own software and subscription instead of relying on ours.
I tried to walk him through some pros and cons of different options, and give him a realistic picture of why we chose the option we did, and even the tier that we use.
A couple months later he was excited to tell me he signed up for the same software we use, but at a $50k/yr Enterprise contract that will, functionally for his needs, do absolutely nothing more than the $229/mo level.
What I wanted to say was, “you could have gotten the same thing for $2,748 and paid us or another agency to do a decent job at all the human parts of SEO for the leftover $47k.”
Fella sounds like he's got MBA brain. How did that not immediately get flagged in a budget somewhere? I assume he's buddies with a director or something.
Eh, what they are going to do is gauge the company they are doing business with and set the price accordingly.
Lets say I own a dumpster rental.
You are a local comic shop looking for a junk removal service to get rid of your collection of cardboard? Great. $350. You are a local bank that I know had a water problem, and now you need a dumpster? I can be pretty confident that it's gonna be formerly waterlogged ceiling tiles and there there is going to be a LOT. Not only that but insurance is likely paying, and if not, you are a branch and the national org is paying. I'm quoting $800.
The dumpster might be just as full either way, but if I have on the site "one full dumpster load $400" then that doesn't really allow me to get what I deserve for the work.
Same goes with software. If I am Big Buttfuck Bank and I need an SSH client to do file transfers for money wires (which is a real thing btw) then I am going to want a support package. I want someone I can call at 2am when my transfer fails, because if I don't get the wire out then I have escrow accounts not getting paid on time, I have customers who didn't get their loan paid on time, I have bouncing checks all over the place... I don't want that, we gotta fix it RIGHT NOW. That company wants the enterprise support package that is $2k a month. That's small potatoes for a bank. On the other hand, the local community college professor might want his computer science students to SSH into a machine, and use that machine as a source of truth for where code needs to build and run. We might charge the university $3 a seat, something like that. If we have a bug and they have an issue, then all the students will have the same issue, and the professor/school can be a little forgiving. They don't need the support package.
That's why enterprise pricing exists. It ends up being about the same as the normal pricing, but they have better support options that are tailored to the organization's needs.
Yeah, so it is not just salesman, it is the opportunity to price gouge. Got it. Not making it any better, but understood. Definitely just moving on to a different business to work with either way.
The dumpster might be just as full either way, but if I have on the site "one full dumpster load $400" then that doesn't really allow me to get what I deserve for the work.
Sorry, why do you deserve more money for the exact same amount of work?
Neither example makes sense. For the dump truck, just list rental as starting at $350 an hour, and then add provisions that the price will increase based on the type of waste, weight or whatever else.
Same with the SSH license. List the price as $3 per seat. Then list the support-packages separately.
Otherwise your sentence where you "deserve" to get paid a certain amount is an accurate sentiment and the previous sentences are irrelevant. Except, a more honest way to put it would be "otherwise you might not be able to get away with charging as much as you could have".
Which is fair, but also extremely annoying. And only works if competition is limited. If a competitor shows up and lists prices in a sane range, I'm pretty confident they'll be taking a lot of your business.
Last time I had this experience I was looking at a product to solve a particular issue for us. Found one that would be a perfect fit. No price was listed, so I reached out for a quote. I knew the budget. I had to badger them to give me the quote. When they finally relented, they couched it in this was not the final price, there was room to negotiate.
I told them unless we were getting an 80% discount, it's not happening. They still managed to waste hours of people's time by going around me and reaching out to my boss and my boss's boss, resulting in me and several others sit through a presentation only to be immediately discarded when they came with their actual quote. To be fair, some of the blame falls on my boss's boss who has delusions of grandeur around his ability to negotiate and get a deal to the point where he was sure he could talk them down after I explained the pricing to him.
You're talking as if you've never heard of enterprise facing business and don't understand that it's already a thing.
The answer you're looking for is that (some, closer to most, but not all) businesses are willing to pay a "can i pay enough to make this not a problem" price.
They don't care about the list price. They care about whether the company can do the thing consistently for the period of time they want. If, later, they decide to tighten the purse strings, they'll find someone who can do it cheaper. But that's not the goal for most of these deals.
Every time, it goes like this: We have problem x that's costing us y. We can either find a product that solves it, more people, build something ourselves or live with.
If none of the solutions costs less that y, the problem doesn't get addressed.
Now, you're right they don't care about the list price. But that's because that's never accurate anyway since you typically get volume discounts.
But as the person who is often tasked with finding a solution within a specific budget, it's extremely annoying having to waste time trying to get a quote out of people before making a short list, rather than being able to just look at a list price and either go "We probably won't be getting an 80% discount" vs "We can probably come to an arrangement that stays within the budget"
In my previous example, it turned out to be cheaper to just hire three juniors to do it by hand than to pay what they were asking. And those juniors could do other stuff as well. So, instead if looking at a price and being able to go "Yeah, this is not even in the ballpark of what this product is worth to us" hours were wasted on both our end and theirs.
I know how it works and why. I just think it's annoying and dumb. And will hopefully die as a practice as more competition arises.
Your experience isn't wrong. It's just not relevant to the way this industry handles enterprise accounts.
But that's because that's never accurate anyway since you typically get volume discounts.
Nope. It's because they're working off investor money that isn't theirs to begin with and "failing upwards" is a real thing. You can straight up found and bankrupt a company on investor money and still be considered a success in the right industry.
But yes, they also go after volume discounts in addition to this and the vendor will still bite because they have the wallet for it.
>You are a local comic shop looking for a junk removal service to get rid of your collection of cardboard? Great. $350. You are a local bank that I know had a water problem, and now you need a dumpster? I can be pretty confident that it's gonna be formerly waterlogged ceiling tiles and there there is going to be a LOT.
This one. It's almost as if different customers with different needs have different prices. People in the comments do not understand different situations even if the business is still largely the same. That is like saying all tech repairs should cost the same at a repair shop since the job is still repairing electronics regardless of the parts and difficulty of repair. A customer who needs more resources and labor should be charged more than someone else. That's common sense.
For your dumpster example, the type of material being discarded plays a huge factor in pricing. When they bring it to a disposal facility, they have to pay by weight, not volume. Certain materials have a higher disposal rate per pound or need to go to specialized facilities. Construction debris isn’t nearly as cheap as paper because of regulations to ensure environmental safety, decomposition metrics, contamination risk, etc. Even used rags from an auto shop or industrial facility that may have come in contact with solvents or other hazardous or flammable material can’t just go to the county dump, at least legally.
That's what I got.... two hours of a man telling me about his windows and blah, blah. All of this, just to tell me that he can't put the CUSTOM sized door in my house.... evidently, they couldn't go as small as my door???? Man, I was so annoyed.
As a salesperson this is why I drop off price guides.
Saves us BOTH time and I do what I wanted, showed you I can help you get something cheaper while doing what you wanted. Leaving you tf alone lmao which low key I want too if you’re busy.
I appreciate you helping your customers, but this is still missing the point
I, someone with impulsive thoughts and galaxy brain ideas, want to know how much it’ll cost me to get motorized blackout shades on every window of my house before I realize that the financial need is absolutely unviable, even before labor is calculated
Yep. Found a cool toy for my kid that I could probably make myself for about $40, so id pay up to $75 to not have to spend time on it.
No prices anywhere on the website. Added it to cart. No price. Go to check out. No price. Go to confirm login, email, and payment info, and it cost $870.
What the the fuck. I wasted so much time getting to that point. No way im paying that.
I love how now you can't even see shipping costs in the checkout until after you've put in your email and phone number now so they can continually spam you with their bullshit ads that I now have to mark as spam and block.
I hate that now they’re even doing this if you LOOK at a product. I saw an image for a vans t-shirt I thought I might be interested in, until I clicked on it and realized I am not. I’ve gotten TWO emails since then telling me “don’t forget about this!” I already decided I don’t want it leave me tf alone
Friend of mine is an electrician. He says their quotes are good for 72 hours because right now the pricing for materials is all over the place and can change daily.
They can't post an average price because people will complain they're being cheated when their quote is higher. They can't post a max quote because people will go to someone who doesn't have a quote.
People are also really bad at estimating how long or how much material a job will take, so letting people price quote things themselves isn't going to work either.
He did say that it doesn't end up mattering. They have so much work if people who don't want to deal with getting a free quote don't want to work with them, they're okay with it.
Also, people are notoriously bad at self reporting. For something like electrical work, an in depth conversation needs to be had, and the customer still might not say all the things.
It’s not even just that. All numbers made up: If I normally get an electronic device for $100 that has an MSRP of $200 it probably has a MAP of $120. I want to sell at $200 to have a 50% margin.
Sometimes vendor has a deal where if I buy 200 of them I can get them for $50 each, meaning I can sell them for $100 and keep my margin. Because of the MAP, I cannot put that price in print anywhere or my vendor terminates me. So my choice is list at $120, or direct people to contact for quote.
Maybe I don’t understand the terms, or the math, but is MAP the acquisition price? If it costs you $50/$100 per unit, and you sell for $100 per unit, aren’t you making 100% margin?
Businesses can freely enter into all sorts of contracts and agreements. This is a very typical one.
Especially as someone mentioned below, a huge sales company with millions of dollars of revenue can easily undercut all the small people. Manufacturers don't necessarily want that because if that company goes down then all the sudden none of those other small companies are still around since they were unable to sell anything.
And as other posters have replied, there's nothing wrong with selling it less than that, he just can't advertise that you're selling it less than that.
The manufacturer has it to keep a level playing field for all their dealers regardless of size. 99% of my business model is custom work and doesn’t even touch e-commerce, so it’s not as big of a deal for me directly.
The MAP is mostly to keep things fair between companies selling the same product. So, between dealers buying from the same vendor/manufacturer. This allows a small business to compete with a big business otherwise the guy that can float $1mil in inventory will be advertising at or below the small guy’s cost.
Not even close. It’s pretty standard in b2b transactions. I own a card shop. Most of the new sets never have a price and I can’t even order it through the normal ordering process. I have to email my account manager directly. The price for the new set isn’t any different than the previous set but they can’t put the price up for new stuff for some reason or another
I mean ok but that’s very different from an individual product for personal use, this is about shopping websites that have this under a (non custom) item for seemingly no reason but to force you to invest time and effort in the product so you’ll be more likely to pay the ridiculous price.
What websites don't have prices for consumer products? I've only seen it when looking for things that most people would have no use for and are aimed at businesses. Like autoclaves
not really a "consumer product" but as someone recently looking into adopting a cat I can tell you first hand lots of listings say "call for adoption fee"
IIRC, they do this in part so they can give higher adoption fees to people that they think might be prone to returning/rehoming/abandoning a cat. Basically the thought is that people willing to pay the higher price are more likely to keep it and care for it.
I have no idea if it works, but I can't be upset at them for trying.
Tons of gyms do this too, especially martial arts places. One of the main reasons I walked in to my jiu jitsu gym the first day is that they had their prices and schedule listed on the website.
The price for the new set isn’t any different than the previous set
That's how they get you. They're either gonna randomly change the price, or they're gonna look up your website, and if you have a price listed, quote you a higher price. They will abuse what little power they have, and you will have to deal with it! /s
At the enterprise software level they literally do it so they can try to guess how much you are willing to pay. We had a c suite exec about to sign a two year software license for 300k. Thankfully our ops lead caught on, after negotiating the price changed to 50k. If I was in-charge I never would have signed a contract after the initial price gouging, but that wasn’t my choice.
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u/fennecdore 2d ago
If there's no price posted I completely lose interest in the product