How To Increase Pricing Visibility At Your Smoke Shop

For centuries philosophers across the globe have pondered the question - if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Well we asked our Got Vape Wholesale A.I.™ for the answer, but for some reason they just said cut down all the trees so humans run out of oxygen… weird right?

Thus after our technology let us down, we promptly gave up and instead pursued our own question that we found much more pertinent - if a customer looks at a water pipe and doesn’t see a price, do you make a sale?

Before you answer, keep reading this Got Vape Wholesale investigatory brief to hear our take on the concept of pricing visibility and why we think it’s worth reviewing at your shop to make sure you are putting your best foot forward with customers and not losing out on potential sales.

Table of Contents:

What Is Pricing Visibility In Retail?
Why Is Pricing Visibility Important?
How Can Pricing Visibility Affect Customer Buying Habits?
Preventing Sticker Shock
How Can I Improve My Pricing Visibility?
Good Old Fashioned Signs
Sorting By Price To Boost Visibility
Big Prices On The Important Products
Television Displays
Bonus: Can Make Sales More Effective
A More Visible Outro

What Is Pricing Visibility In Retail?

Simply put, pricing visibility is a measure of how easily customers can figure out the items on your shelves actually cost.

When looking over your wares do they see a sea of pipes mashed together with no real ability to see the exact pricing? Or is everything neatly laid out with prices prominently displayed?

These are the questions that pricing visibility asks and while it is an obvious thing to have, smoke shops are not grocery stores with neat uniform shelves.

Our products range from things as large as a hookah pipe, to those as small as a pack of papers, there is no one type of item which can lead to instances where prices are just entirely omitted in the display due to the hodge-podge nature of our inventories.

Why Is Pricing Visibility Important?

You may be saying to yourself “well I just tell the customers the price when they ask, why is it important to actually list them?”. To answer that, we went straight to the source: real customers.

In order to get a true barometer of customer opinions, for the past several months Got Vape Wholesale has been investigating reddit, facebook, and every forum in between to get a read on what customers are actually thinking about the smoke shop experience.

One of the most frequent posts we saw was people complaining about the lack of visible pricing within their smoke shop. This was an issue that many people related to and it stood out to us as a recurring issue that many may not be aware of.

Customers these days do an immense amount of their spending online where price information is both prominently displayed and an expected part of doing commerce online.

When they come into your shop and see the complete opposite, it can cause them to adjust their spending habits in ways that can negatively affect your bottom line.

How Can Pricing Visibility Affect Customer Buying Habits?

Whether people know it or not, when they browse through smoke shops they are doing a massive amount of subliminal mental math as they compare the prices of items, with the value that they have in their head.

When they are unable to see these prices their thought process is interrupted and any sort of price / value matrix going on in their head is going to never get past step one, seeing!

Yes, seeing really is believing with customers, it's one thing to hear the price from you but when they can just walk by and see it, it allows them to make their own private decisions. If you omit your prices from view then you are losing out these potential sales.

More introverted customers may not be interested in asking how much the new Puffco Peak Pro is, but if you have the price loudly displayed then they may realize that it's not quite as much as they thought it was.

Many shoppers just assume the top of the line items are out of reach, but many of the premium brands like Focus V and Puffco now have more affordable devices that open them up for a much wider option.

If you hide these prices away, people will be free to make their assumptions due to the lack of good information. Luckily for us, proper pricing visibility fixes all of these issues and more!

Preventing Sticker Shock

Another main goal of increasing your pricing visibility, is to reduce the retail phenomenon known as sticker shock, or when customers initially interested in a product suddenly lose all their enthusiasm to purchase upon learning the real price or sticker price if you will.

By increasing the amount of pricing visibility, it prevents people from getting their hearts set on a piece they thought was in the $50 range, only to find out at the register that it’s actually $300!

All of a sudden sticker shock madness strikes and even though they were about to spend $50 dollars at your shop, they decide to spend nothing after the piece that they really wanted was revealed to be out of their price range.

Meanwhile if you had highly visible prices, the whole thing would have been avoided and expectations wouldn't have been let down.

In this positive version of the Twilight Zone the customer remarks how they like the $300 piece, but then simply moves onto the $50 section to get something that is in their price range. Thus you get a sale and the customer doesn’t have to leave with a sour taste in their mouth about your shop.

How Can I Improve My Pricing Visibility?

There’s several easy ways to boost your pricing visibility and most of them don’t cost much more than a few office supplies.

The only hard part of this whole process is the act of simply implementing it. You have to take the time to go through your shop and decide how you want to present prices to customers for each of them.

Good Old Fashioned Signs

A great way to make your prices readily available to customers is to make use of tiny stands and paper inserts. These are a great way to make your glass look both incredibly professional and let customers fully understand the values on display at your shop.

These are also great because if your prices shift, you can simply print out or buy new inserts to change the price.

A solid example for what you need is something like these Mini Acrylic Holders. We recommend going to a store where you can see the tags in person, so you can get a good idea of what the sizes are and make sure that you don’t accidentally buy too big / small.

Stores like Staples and other office goods businesses will have these, so make sure to check them out for an incredibly cheap way to take care of pricing visibility.

Sorting By Price To Boost Visibility

A great way to deal with something like an overabundance of hand pipes is to sort them by price and have sections based off of this.

You can for example have $5, $20, and 50$ dollar sections where every pipe is priced the same in each section to allow customers to easily see the difference in values. This also aids with their decision making, as they can go to the section in their price point and choose between them without having to remember each individual price.

This can also be done with price ranges, for example if you have a wide variety of different water pipes that you want to place together you could have ranges such as pieces 100 or less, 100 - 200, and then 200+.

This will all be dependent on your inventory, but the principle stands strong as a smart way to both direct customer attention and let them know exactly what they are dealing with.

Big Prices On The Important Products

If you find yourself overwhelmed with visibly pricing everything in your shop, don’t be.

You don’t have to do these all at once, or ever! Smaller items like papers and other accessories are typically priced low enough that customers are expecting to get something in that range.

On the flip side of this, is the idea that you should try to focus on your really important items first in order to guarantee that they are getting the necessary eyes on them to sell. This could be for your more expensive E-Rigs or other devices from popular name brands like Stündenglass or Storz & Bickel.

Having your prices be boldly displayed (and with a better price than online if possible) is a sure fire way to ensure that customers will immediately know if they are going to consider that item and can then plan their purchases around it.

Another bonus to having the prices visible for your big items is that it gives customers an aspirational item that they would like to get. If they see that Venty Portable Dry Herb Vaporizer is X amount of $$$, then they can slowly save up or find a time that they can swing the purchase.

This keeps people coming back and effectively is free marketing all by just prominently displaying the price point!

Television Displays

A smart option that we have seen utilized by smoke shops is the installation of a television screen or two in order to display prices / a slideshow of prices.

While this is obviously the most expensive cost wise, these screens can double to tease promotions you are having in the future or even show certain products that have newly arrived.

Placing the screen somewhere prominent and highly visible is a must to getting the most bang for your buck here. As an added bonus it gives shoppers something to look at in case you have an extended line at the check out.

Bonus: Can Make Sales More Effective

One parting thought we wanted to leave you with is that when you make your prices more visible to customers they start to get used to seeing those values.

Thus when you have a sale and the price is cut by 40%, they can actually understand just how much of a saving they are getting. As opposed to customers who see a % discount and have trouble viewing the overall monetary value, they will have the extra knowledge to know just how special those sales are.

By letting people get familiar with the regular prices, they will have even more incentive to take advantage of sales to make your seasonal discounts even more effective at moving products.

A More Visible Outro

Now that you have a better idea of all the benefits that come from boosting your pricing visibility, it's time to decide which of our tips you want to make good on and which ones you want to toss in the bin!

The whole goal is to get you thinking about these pricing visibility customer options, so that even if you change nothing about your set up, you are now at least aware that some customers are dismayed by a lack of visible pricing.

With September now fully underway, we have just under four months left to squeeze out every last dollar we can for 2024, so make sure to check back here at the Got Vape Wholesale Blog for upcoming guides and more sales tips!

If you need help moving back stock or figuring out the world of high risk credit card processing, make sure to check out our previous postings on those subjects!