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Why do enterprise sales pages for technology products often not show pricing?

It seems that many enterprise-focused sales pages for technology products don’t show pricing. Here are some examples:

Why is this? What’s wrong with displaying the price immediately? Don’t customers get annoyed by this?

Answer 8799

  1. Buying in bulk (as enterprise buyers would do - either hundreds of licenses or others of pieces of hardware or they might sign a contract saying they will buy a few hundred every month for 12months) will get discounts.
  2. Sometimes bulk is bought on credit, meaning the seller can charge interest. The interest might be taxed differently, so the seller might re-arrange the prices in order to take greater tax advantages.
  3. Buying something is not just buying something - Sometimes there are value added services. Because these can be taxed different than the purchase price, you could find the hardware is sold ‘free’ while a services contract is inflated. It would be a tax efficient sale (though the tax man in some regions might refer to it as tax avoidance). An example of this has been flagged for concern with the HP purchase of Autonmy. Supposedly Autonmy had booked a number of sales at a loss so that services could be offered at cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy

You will sometimes see deals like this for the ordinary consumer and not know it. For example, a croissant and coffee might be packaged whereby the coffee is free but the croissant is charged. Reason this might occur is some countries will apply a tax if food is heated. So if you charge $2 for the coffee/croissant, and the coffee is free, then no tax will be applied (just as an example) so the vendor can increase his profits without increasing the cost to the customer… The sale then becomes more attractive to the buyer, without any real cost.

Answer 8829

Another reason is that you don't want standard prices. Economy says if you lower the price you sell more. You can choose the price and how much you sell follows from the curve:

price sales curve

So you pick the price that offers the most profit:

price sales curve with profit for ideal fixed price

But this is not actually the best price. There are people who don't want to pay as much, so you lose sales and miss out on money. Also there are people willing to pay more for your product, but they just pay the standard price, so again you miss out on money. What you actually want is to sell the product to each customer for the maximum price they are willing to pay:

price sales curve with the whole curve being profit

Look at all that profit! Of course now you need to haggle with people to figure out the maximum price and hope you are better at it than them. This is also standard practice for airplane tickets: There is a good chance that every single one of the 400ish passengers of a Boeing 747 flight payed a different price for their ticket.

Lots of products do this, but the effort correlates with the margin. You can buy the same washing powder for lots of money in a good brand box or for cheap in a no-name brand box. That's as much effort they can afford to squeeze out some extra cents. When you buy an expensive car or a house you have a sales person dedicated to you to get the maximum out of you. Youtube not allowing people to talk about how much add revenue they get is another example.

Of course people feel cheated when they notice, so some effort is put into preventing that. With enterprise level prices it is worth using a dedicated sales person and offer a discount if they sign an NDA to prevent people from noticing. If you are just browsing and comparing prices and services you are not the target audience.

(I saw an article about this somewhere including the airplane ticket example, but I cannot find it anymore. Would be nice if someone remembers and links it.)

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