The Premise: I have a widget and my customers are owners of ecommerce sites and my widget would help them save on returned orders. The widget would have to be installed on each product page.<p>The Problem: I'm trying to figure a way to differentiate pricing for different sized ecommerce stores. Right now I can just charge say $19.99/month to use the widget, but that means any store from the small niche to walmart could use it for $19.99/month, which just doesn't seem right.<p>Is there some way, that would make sense to the customer, to tier the pricing? Say charge some small amount like .5 cents per click on the widget? I would have to correlate the number of clicks to money saved and price appropriately but I am just wondering if it is worth it or am I just confusing the customer who just wants to pay a set monthly fee?<p>It would be nice to be able to say there are four packages (19.99, 99.99, 199.99, etc) but I just don't know how to differentiate that fairly.<p>Any help is appreciated.
If the widget is hosted on your server then you could bracket your plans based on the traffic. So you could say $19.99 for up to 50,000 page views a month, etc. How valuable your widget is would determine how much you can charge (be sure to factor in your bandwidth costs as well if the widget is a decent size).<p>One other comment, encouraging people to click on anything other than the "buy now" button on a product page isn't going to be very appealing to most e-commerce people. Returns are expensive, but the last thing people want to do is deter orders.
Here's a great article on the subject from Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot founder). <a href="http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Software-Without-Just-Rolling-The-Dice.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Soft...</a>