Why the Prices on Your Website Are Wrong (And Whose Fault That Is)

Go and look at the price list on your website. Go on, I’ll wait.

Is it right?

In my experience, about half the time the answer is no, or “mostly”, or “the ones at the top are”. And it is almost never because the business owner does not care. It is because changing a price on a website is annoying enough that it slips to next week, and then it is March.

How the friction actually works

You put your prices up by three pounds in the salon. The till is updated, the printed list is reprinted, everyone knows.

The website is a different job. Either you log into a CMS you use four times a year and cannot quite remember, or you email your web person, who gets to it on Thursday, and by then you have thought of two more changes. So you wait until you have a proper list of them. That list never quite gets finished.

Six months later a customer arrives expecting to pay what the website said.

That is not a laziness problem. That is a design problem, and it is the web person’s fault, not yours. If updating a price takes more effort than the price change is worth, the system is wrong.

Why a full CMS is often the wrong answer

The instinct is to fix this by giving the client a content management system. Now you can edit anything you like, any time.

For a lot of small businesses this makes it worse. A CMS you use rarely is a CMS you have to relearn every time. There is a login you have forgotten, an interface that has been redesigned since you last saw it, and a genuine fear of breaking the page. So you still do not do it.

And you have now taken on plugin updates, security patches and a hosting bill sized for software you barely touch.

The question is not “how do we give them control of everything?” It is “what do they actually need to change, and how often?”

For most service businesses the honest answer is prices, a few descriptions, and opening hours at Christmas. That is a much smaller problem.

The version that works

For Lexden Retreat, a beauty salon in Colchester, we skipped the CMS entirely. Treatment names, prices and descriptions live in a Google Sheet. Emma edits the sheet, the site rebuilds from it, and the new prices are live.

No login to forget. No interface to relearn. A spreadsheet, which she already uses, and which cannot break the layout of the website no matter what she types into it.

We also deliberately left one pricing category out of the sheet, because it was sensitive and pre-agreed and did not want to be editable by accident. That is the kind of thing worth deciding up front rather than discovering later.

The result is that prices get updated when prices change, not when someone finally gets round to it.

The version that works even better

If you run software that already holds your prices, your till, your booking system, your practice management software, then the best answer is to not type them twice at all.

A lot of these systems have an API, which means your website can read the prices directly from the system you already maintain. You change it once, in the place you were always going to change it, and the website follows.

Not every platform allows it, and some charge for access. But it is worth asking the question before you commit to maintaining a second copy of your own price list forever.

What to do about it this week

Three things, none of which take long.

Check your live prices against what you actually charge. Write down every discrepancy.

Ask yourself honestly how long it would take you, right now, to change one of them. If the answer is more than about two minutes, that is why they are wrong.

Then decide what you genuinely need to be able to edit yourself. It is usually a much shorter list than people expect, and a much shorter list means a much simpler solution.

If your website prices have been quietly wrong for a while and you would rather they were not, give us a shout. It is usually a smaller fix than you think.