As someone who is fascinated by a/b testing, metrics driven design, lean startups, and all of the things that go with smart startup design, I found it particularly interesting what I saw the other night while chatting with a friend of mine. We were talking about Vaultpress, the upcoming product from Automattic to manage blog backups. I said “it seems kind of overpriced to me, its $20/month” he tells me “what are you talking about, it’s only $10!”.
So in addition to their innovative “suggest it yourself” form they are price testing what seems to be 3 price points (their faq, my $20 price, and his $10 price). Chances are they are testing a handful of other price points as well.
See my version
and now his
This is definitely one of the most clever examples of price testing before a product launch.
What examples have you seen of price testing in the wild?
And they're testing me at $25 🙂
and me at $400 / # of friends…
I saw $25 the first time I went to vaultpress a while back.
Excellent, excellent examples!
Price elasticity testing is about the simplest thing you can do to drive the largest gains in profit – wrote up an article about this a while back here:
http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/06/one-si…
You can also edit it, and tell them what you WOULD pay..
respectfully, ASKING someone how much they want to pay for something defeats the purpose of a/b testing – it’s too easy for them to say “$0.01”. a/b testing should monitor actual behavior for specific “a” or “b” conditions. by giving them a choice you just have a/b/c/d/…zz testing
John
you missed the point they are still suggesting price points.
Despite A/B testing, where they eventually settled was still pricey. Matt Cutts from Google just tweeted about an alternative that can monitor and backup non-WordPress sites for a fraction of the cost. (http://bit.ly/kPdIfz). You can sign up for the beta at codeguard.com with “BRESLIN” as the code.