Starting a Florida Business: Pricing Your Product

Pricing your Florida business products or services might seem like a shot in the dark. It shouldn’t.

Pricing your business goods and services for the market is one of the most important areas of focus you’ll spend time on. You’ll continually revise prices until you find that balance where Florida consumer and Florida provider (you) come to an agreement about what your product or services are worth.

Here are some steps to go about figuring out pricing your products online. Luckily for you the internet has made competitive pricing research quite easy. Here are some tips for researching prices for similar items or services your Florida business will focus on:

Start your research on pricing your Florida business products / services at Google.com. Create very specific searches for your product. A search composed this way: “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price” will give you a slew of results that you can pick through. As you’re picking through you might notice that the prices seem high and you might want to find out what the lowest prices are… change your query to:  “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale unbeatable price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest prices guaranteed”. Google allows for removing words from your query too. If you notice you’re getting a lot of results that don’t fit what you want to see – use a minus in front of the word that would get rid of those results like, use this query “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price -france”.

Have a look at EBay.com. Realize that these are often bottom rate prices and don’t include everything that you might expect to get with the product. A careful read of the description will point out any missing accessories or any special weirdness about the sale. Maybe it’s a 2nd hand item. Maybe it’s being shipped from Romania (beware of scams!). A little research on Ebay will quickly show you the bottom rate price others are selling for. Many buyers are afraid to complete Ebay transactions because of the number of scams going on. You may decide to try Ebay to help market your Florida products or services. Expect cutthroat competition.

Find your competition online. Companies give a lot of information away on their websites that would take you a lot of time to ask on the phone. Often times the real deals and sales happen over the phone once you’re talking to a salesperson that’s empowered to sell the items at a bigger discount than you see online. This might be a strategy you also employ with your Florida corporation.

Check prices for your items in Google Checkout, Yahoo Shopping, and major outlets like BestBuy or wherever similar goods and services are sold.

Value add. A very strong business practice is the value add. If you are able to come up with something to add to the Florida products and services your company offers you could jump ahead of the competition and create quite a profitable business just based on this simple idea. What would sell well with your product? If your product is the Nokia e71 mobile phone how could you really sell a lot of them? Offer a short tutorial booklet on how to unlock the phone when they receive it so they’re not tied to any one mobile carrier? Maybe offer a subscription to a mobile phone application software developer for a year for 1/3rd of the typical price? (you’d work it out with the developer so you’re still making a good profit)

Note: Make sure you have a good idea about the pattern of price drops for your items if you’re buying them from a supplier. You might purchase a phone at 60% discount from retail because you’re buying 50 of them. For a couple months you do fine, selling at 60% profit. Then, because Nokia comes out with the e81, price points for the e71′s drop substantially. Now you’re only making 20% from each Nokia e71 you sell. Can you live on that? Be careful especially with electronics devices since they are updated and outdated so quickly.

Pricing your Florida products and services is a tricky game. If you price close to what you’re competitors are charging you may be fine with that – you may not. Your competitors, other Florida companies may be buying 100 times what you’re buying from the supplier and getting a much better discount. What you don’t see can hurt you. Be cautious and smart when pricing your items for sale with your new Florida business! Pricing can make or break you.