The Page That Answers the Awkward Question

The three questions

Every customer wants to know them and almost every website avoids them.

What does this cost, roughly. How soon could you actually come. And is there a version of my problem that you would not take on.

The avoidance is understandable. Each answer feels like it might lose you work.

What it actually loses is the enquiry from somebody who would have been a good customer and could not tell.

Why silence is expensive

A visitor who cannot find a price does one of three things.

They phone to ask, which is fine if you want that conversation forty times a month. They assume it is expensive and leave. Or they assume it is cheap, enquire, and are disappointed by your quote.

Two of those three are bad outcomes, and the third is a cost in time.

Meanwhile a competitor publishing a range has already had that conversation, at no cost, with everybody who read the page.

Price, done honestly

The objection is always that every job is different, which is true and is not a reason to say nothing.

What works: a starting figure, a typical range for a common case, and the two or three things that move it.

"Most bathrooms in this area come in between these figures. Older properties with plumbing to move sit at the upper end. A full retile without moving anything sits at the lower."

That is honest, useful, and commits you to nothing. It also demonstrates that you know your own numbers, which reads as competence.

The alternative, contact us for a quote, is what everybody says and answers nothing.

A worked example

A cabinet maker who refused to publish prices for years on the grounds that his work was bespoke.

He was fielding perhaps twenty enquiries a month and quoting on eight, of which he won two. The other six were people whose expectations were nowhere near his figures, and each had cost him a site visit and an evening writing a quote.

He added one paragraph giving a per-metre starting figure and naming the three things that push it up.

Enquiries dropped to about twelve. Quotes fell to five. He won three.

More work, from fewer enquiries, with several evenings a month returned to him.

His observation afterwards was that the enquiries he lost were the ones he had never been going to win, and he had been paying to discover that individually.

Wait times

The second awkward answer, and the one that damages reputation when avoided.

A business booked four weeks out that implies immediate availability generates disappointed enquiries and occasionally reviews about being unresponsive.

Saying so plainly does the opposite. "We are currently booking about three weeks ahead for non-urgent work, and we keep space for emergencies" tells somebody whether to bother, and reads as a business in demand.

The maintenance burden is real: a stated wait time goes stale. The answer is either a general statement you can live with, or a habit of updating it monthly.

What you will not do

The third, and the one businesses find hardest.

Every trade has work it declines: too small, too far, outside its competence, or simply unpleasant. Most sites list only what they do, so those enquiries arrive anyway.

Saying it plainly saves everybody time. "We do not take on jobs under a certain value" is not rude. "We do not work on properties outside these areas" is useful. "We do not do warranty work on installations by others" is a legitimate policy.

It also signals confidence. A business that turns work away is one with enough of it.

The counter-case

Where publishing is genuinely the wrong call.

Where price is genuinely unknowable without an inspection, and a range would be so wide as to be meaningless. Some restoration and structural work falls here.

Where you compete for contracts under commercial terms and publishing a figure would undercut your negotiating position.

And where a stated wait time is so volatile that any figure will be wrong within a week, in which case a general statement is more honest than a number.

Those are real. They are also fewer than the businesses claiming them, and the honest test is whether you could publish a range if you were willing to.

How to write it

1. State the figure or range plainly, without apology.
2. Explain what moves it, in two or three factors.
3. Give one concrete example of a typical job and its cost.
4. Say what is included, and what is not.
5. Date it if prices change, so a stale figure is visibly stale.

The third does most of the work. An abstract range is hard to apply; a named example lets somebody place themselves against it.

Where the page goes

Not buried, and not necessarily a page of its own.

Price belongs on each service page, near the top, because that is where the question arises.

Wait times belong on the contact page and anywhere you invite an enquiry.

What you decline belongs on the service page it relates to, or in a short section of frequently asked questions where it will actually be read.

A separate pricing page works too, and only if it is linked from everywhere the question occurs. A pricing page reachable only from the main menu is a page most visitors never find.

The discomfort

Worth naming, because it is the real obstacle rather than any of the arguments.

Publishing a price feels exposing. It invites comparison, it fixes something you would rather keep flexible, and it means somebody might decide against you without speaking to you.

All of that is true. The alternative is that they decide against you anyway, without speaking to you, and you never know it happened.

Start with one service rather than the whole site. Publishing a range for the work you most want more of tells you within a couple of months whether the enquiries improve, and that is a cheaper experiment than a decision made on principle.

Which of your services to start with is the same judgement as in describing a service without listing features.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.