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Comment by theartfuldodger | Hacker News Reader

I ask this question a lot from new clients coming in for marketing or ecommerce rebuilds who have this style pricing.

I get three answers

1. Not allowed ( manufacturer/vendor regs)

2. High Touch sales, "anyone who was over worried about price isn't likely a buyer/good match" real buyers know the price range and we need to customize/vet the buyer

3. Highly customizable product that they cant or won't invest into making possible to pre-price online, probably wont get added to a cart and shipped or sold without a buyer wanting to actually talk to someone)

( for example, a 150k Caterpillar with various attachment options)

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Unrelated - but #2 is interesting.

Last year I was on a market for high-end car (~$100k price tag) and one dealer who had the vehicle we wanted absolutely refused to give the price via email and insisted that I had to drive 1 hr for a personal visit.

I did very fair, prolonged effort to try to get them to sell me a car to no avail.

Ended up flying 2 hrs to another city where they had a car (of a different brand) with a specs I loved. I ended up enjoying driving it back home.

Being stubborn, hard-nosed sales person clearly doesn't pay off, no matter the excuse.

> Highly customizable product that they cant or won't invest into making possible to pre-price online, probably wont get added to a cart and shipped or sold without a buyer wanting to actually talk to someone)

This isn't a good reasons not to have a guide to the pricing though (e.g., the base price plus the rough prices of popular options). That can be super useful for determining if this is possibly something the buyer might want to buy, and saves them a ton of time calling salesmen.

The other two reasons are reasonable.

If you're selling ~$150k worth of customizable hardware and services to improve people's business processes, I'm not sure there are many genuine buyers out there that haven't got a few minutes to discuss which of the many, many options might be relevant to their needs rather than rely on probably unrepresentative "base price" and "popular" options on a website. If there are executives that evaluate ~$150k range business process improvements based on published sticker prices to save time on calling salespeople, their company really, really ought to be taking decision making power away from them.

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