This is another post in our BUSINESS MUSINGS series.

If you're in the business of providing WordPress themes, add-ons or services, maybe these observations will be familiar to you.

About three months ago we decided to add an exit popup on our website.  The pop-up was a poll that asked visitors why they were leaving.  One of the options was "Its too expensive". If the user clicked on that option we followed up with a question asking what a reasonable price would be.  To say we were floored by some of the responses would be an understatement.

90% of the "Reasonable" price responses ranged from 20.00 to about 30.00.  For everything.  For lifetime updates and support.

To put that in perspective, we released more than 10 new add-ons over the last year or so where we easily invested over 4000+ hours of development time.  That's over and above the regular maintenance of the free plugin and the existing premium add-ons.  Which means that the value that those visitors placed on just our newer products amounted to less than a penny per hour of new development time.

Now, we realize that the WordPress ecosystem has evolved as an ultra low-cost environment for websites.  But to trust mission critical applications to plugins that cost $20.00 or $30.00 blow our minds.  We're not talking about plugins that make a website pretty - we're talking about plugins that can easily affect the reputation of a business - the mission critical applications.  Whether its ERP, Project Management, Help Desk or other line-of-business functions, it really boggles our minds that business users believe that $20.00 is a reasonable price to pay for these kinds of mission critical applications.  Or that their customers are best served by them.

How much R&D can a vendor afford if they're selling their products at $20 - $30?  How much support can they provide at that price level?  How much quality control can be done before products priced at those levels are released? Even in lower cost geographic areas the economics simply do not make sense to us.

Even if we tripled our sales by lowering prices to that level, it would not be enough to finance even a single medium-complexity add-on - not if we want to actually pay our regular business expenses as well.  And we'd triple our expenses for providing support if we wanted to keep the support quality at the current level.

Prelude To A Question

So all that commentary was the background story behind our real question - how do we, as business owners, demonstrate value to visitors with this mindset in the two or three minutes they spend browsing our site?  Is it even possible?  Is there additional information we can include?  Or maybe we can do a better job of presenting the information that's already on the site?

Feel free to send opinions and feedback to contact@getawesomesupport.com.  We'll do a follow up article on your comments in a few months!