Pricing Your Products Effectively
When you start selling products and are trying to establish your business on Blender Market, it can be difficult to figure out how you should price your products. Do you price based on how much time you spent on it? Or what you feel someone might pay for it? Or some other magical amount that can be determined with a complex formula? This article offers some suggestions to help you price your products.
Value Your Time and Effort
The biggest and most important consideration is to value the time and effort that you have put into your product. Time is money, as they say., and your time, with the specialized skills that you have, is worth something. Don't undervalue yourself and your work by offering a product that took you weeks to create at $5. For one thing, your business will be unlikely to thrive if your time-spent-to-money-earned ratio is low, and for another, customers are bound to be skeptical that a complex product is being sold for so little. That skepticism may drive them away from your product.
It is impractical to price your product based on how many hours it took you to make it; after all, your product is not a one-time commission but something that can be sold an infinite number of times. Nevertheless, the price of a product that took you a month to create will be vastly different from a product that it took you an afternoon to create. Think about how you can balance the time you have spent on the product with the multiple sales and continuing revenue that you hope to bring in from it.
Consider the Prices of Similar Products
A good way to determine how to price your product is by looking at how products that are similar to yours are priced. Take into account the features of your product and find others that are like it. How are they priced? Do they have more or fewer features than your product? Do they appear to be higher or lower quality in comparison to your product? Do they provide documentation that is more or less extensive than what you provide?
Once you have identified a range of prices and figured out where your product falls compared to other products, decide what price in the range would be appropriate. If your product appears to be top-of-the-line compared to other, similar products, price it at the higher end. If it is more basic and has fewer bells and whistles than other products, price it at the lower end. If it falls somewhere in between, price it in the middle of the range.
Determine What Your Product is Worth to Customers
Another important consideration is how your product will speed up, simplify, or improve your customers' work. For example, a low-poly, game-ready rock could be easy for a customer to make, so selling it for $20 may not be an effective strategy. A lower price would better reflect both the time that you have invested in the product and the rock's value to a customer. At the other end of the spectrum, an add-on that quickly and efficiently allows customers to do work that would otherwise be time-consuming and painstaking, e.g., retopologizing their work or creating realistic fluid simulations, would be of significantly higher monetary value to your customers.
A helpful strategy is to consider what you might pay for a product like yours if you were a customer. What role would the product have in your workflow and how valuable would it be to you? Would it be a one-time use product, or something that you use again and again? Would it save you five minutes or five days' worth of work? Would the effort required to learn how to use it outweigh the time-saving benefits? In the case of products like trainings, are the skills taught in the training foundational or niche? Are they standalone skills or important parts of broader workflows? Are you offering a 10-hour course or a 10-minute tutorial?
Revise Pricing as You Go
This is key: the price at which you start selling your product does not have to be the price that it sells at forever. Gauge the customer response to your product's pricing. Yes, there will always be people who complain that things are too expensive regardless of how much they cost. Do your best to ignore those people. In some cases, raising the price on your product will lead to increased sales. It just depends on what your product is and where it fits in the market.