I put a price on the site for the first time and it cost me nothing
for years I had "DM for pricing" at the bottom like everyone told me to. the reasoning was always that talking to people gets you further than a number on a page.
then a friend who sells furniture online said something that stuck. she said the only people who ask about price are the ones who already want it, and you're making them jump through a hoop to find out they can't afford it. so in march I put actual numbers up. the torn paper pieces at 240, the big charcoal ones at 900, a couple of small ones at 85.
lost nothing. no angry messages. what I did lose was about an hour a week of the same conversation, the one where someone says "and what would something like this run" and then goes quiet. and I got three sales off people who told me later they'd been watching for months and only bought once they saw I wasn't going to ask them to negotiate over DMs like it's a rug in a market.
the thing nobody warns you about with hiding prices is that it makes you look like you're deciding how much each person is worth. I wasn't doing that. I just didn't want to be told my numbers were too high. which is its own problem, and putting them on the page mostly cured it, because the number stops being a thing I have to defend in a chat window and starts being a fact on a page.
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The furniture friend is right, and it's the same in my trade. When I had "message me for prices" on my site I spent half my week answering people who were never going to buy, and the ones who would buy got annoyed that I was being cagey. Now the numbers are up, the tire-kickers filter themselves out, and the messages I do get are from people who already decided. The part people miss is that a price is also information about the work. 900 for the charcoal pieces tells a stranger you cut and set stone by hand over weeks, not that you're expensive. The silence on the low end scares people more than the number does.
"a price is information about the work." yeah. and I'll be honest, I resisted that for a long time because I came up with no training and no gallery and I figured if I said 900 out loud someone would laugh at me. put it up anyway last year. nobody laughed. the number did more explaining than my artist statement ever did.
where I'd push back a little, the low end. I priced some small charcoal studies at 60 early on and I think that actually hurt me, people read cheap as unsure, not as accessible. curious if you've hit that with the stone stuff or if the low end moves faster for you than it did for me.
the 60 dollar studies thing, yeah. I did that too, early, and what it bought me was a bunch of people who wanted a small thing for the price of a small thing and never came back for anything else. cheap reads as unsure, you're right. I'd rather sell one at 85 to somebody who actually wanted it.
and the laugh thing. that fear doesn't really go away, it just gets quieter. I put 900 on a big charcoal piece and sat there for a week waiting for somebody to say something. nobody did. the silence was the answer.
"a price is information about the work" is the part I keep coming back to. I'd been treating the number as a filter, and it's really more like the label on the jar. 900 for a big charcoal piece does say something the caption never would.
and yeah, the silence at the low end. someone will spend months assuming the 85 ones are bad rather than just... cheap. which they are. they're small. that's the whole point of them.