Publishing Your Prices or Saying Price on Request

There are two workable positions on pricing and one expensive one. You can publish your prices, or you can answer them privately, and both are perfectly respectable. What costs people money is doing neither consistently, so that some buyers see a number and others are asked to enquire, and nobody is quite sure what anything is worth.

What publishing actually buys you

Published prices filter. Anyone who messages you has already accepted the number, which removes the entire negotiating conversation before it starts. It also works while you are asleep, because a buyer comparing options at midnight can decide without waiting on you. The trade is that you lose the ability to price the individual, and you are visibly comparable to everyone else.

What price on request actually buys you

Answering privately lets you read the request before you value it. A rush order, an unusual specification or a buyer who clearly wants a great deal of your attention can be priced for what it will really cost you. The trade is volume. Every enquiry becomes a conversation, and a proportion of those conversations were never going to end in a sale.

The hybrid that works

Most sellers land somewhere sensible in the middle. Standard items carry a public price, and anything bespoke says from, followed by a real starting figure. The word from is doing something specific there. It sets a floor, so the conversation starts above the number rather than beneath it, and it prevents the enquiry that opens by asking whether you would consider half.

Whichever you pick, write it down

The failure is almost never the choice, it is the inconsistency. If the same item has been quoted at three different figures this month, that will eventually reach two buyers who talk to each other, and the cheaper quote becomes the real price. Keep your own list, even a rough one, and quote from it rather than from how the conversation happens to be going.

Price on request is not evasive and published pricing is not naive. Only the accidental version, where the answer depends on who is asking and what mood you are in, reliably loses money.