You have probably been told never to put prices on your business website. Every sales coach, every marketing consultant, every well-meaning friend with a LinkedIn profile says the same thing. Make them ring. Get them on a call. Once you put a number on the page you lose all the negotiation leverage. The advice has been repeated so many times that most owners now treat it as gospel.

It is mostly wrong. And the small slice of it that is right is wrong for completely different reasons than the people repeating it tend to give.

Where the Old Advice Came From

The "never list your prices" rule comes from a pre-internet sales playbook. In a world where the buyer had to phone you to find out anything, holding the price back was a defensible tactic. It got the customer on the line. It let a salesperson qualify the lead, build rapport, anchor expectations, soften the number. That logic carried over into the early web, and from there into every "growth tip" thread on LinkedIn ever since.

The buyer's behaviour has moved on. The advice has not.

A modern customer, Irish or otherwise, does most of their research before they ever talk to you. They open a few competitor sites in browser tabs. They compare. They form an opinion. They shortlist two or three names. Then, and only then, they might pick up the phone. If your price is not findable during that comparison stage, you are not in the shortlist. You are not even in the consideration set.

What Customers Actually Do When They Cannot Find a Price

This is not just my view from sales calls. The usability research is unusually consistent on this point.

Nielsen Norman Group, who have been running structured studies of business buyers for over twenty years, are blunt about it. Across hundreds of recorded sessions with B2B customers, they watched participants get frustrated and leave sites that did not show prices, then go to a competitor's site that did ^[1]. Pricing is, in their data, the single most-requested piece of information on a business website. Their conclusion is harder to argue with than most usability findings, because they have watched it happen on camera so many times.

The broader consumer numbers point the same way. PwC's 2024 customer experience survey found roughly 8 in 10 customers prefer brands with clear, simple pricing ^[2]. Trustpilot's research puts the share of consumers who say they need to trust a brand before they buy at about the same level. Even general web behaviour studies put the share of visitors who decide whether to stay on a site within ten seconds at around four in ten. If they cannot find what they came for, they go.

EY's recent work on Irish consumers specifically is worth reading on this. Their conclusion is that Irish buyers, sharpened by a few years of cost-of-living pressure, now treat price clarity as a trust signal in its own right ^[3]. If you are vague about the number, the assumption is that the number is bad, the answer is "it depends", or the business model relies on the customer not finding out until it is too late.

What a transparent pricing page actually signals.

The Trust Signal You Did Not Realise You Were Sending

Here is the bit most owners do not consider when they decide to hide the number.

A customer who lands on your services page, scrolls, and cannot find a price does not think "this looks like a high-end provider, I should fill in a quote form". They think one of three things. You are expensive and embarrassed about it. You change the price depending on who is asking. Or you are simply going to waste their time with a sales process when all they wanted was a ballpark.

None of those reads is good. All three end the same way. They close the tab.

This matters even more in the current Irish regulatory climate. The Consumer Protection Code 2025 went live on 24 March 2026, with explicit higher expectations around transparency in pricing and digital engagement ^[4]. The draft EU Digital Fairness Act, which the Pinsent Masons team have written about clearly, is taking aim at hidden fees and opaque pricing presentations as unfair commercial practices ^[5]. The legal direction of travel is plain. The customer expectation has moved the same way.

The Narrow Case for Staying Quiet

There is a real exception, and it is worth naming honestly. If your work is genuinely bespoke, where every engagement varies on a dozen different variables and the price genuinely could be €5,000 or €150,000 depending on scope, listing a single number would mislead more buyers than it helps. A management consultancy taking on multi-year transformation work. A custom manufacturer building one-off machinery. A specialist solicitor where the case complexity drives the cost.

Even then, the right answer is rarely a "contact us for a quote" page. It is a starting-from figure. A typical range. A day rate with a clear scope of what that day looks like. The shape that fits your business. Anything that lets the customer rule themselves in or out in five seconds, without filling in a form first.

If you cannot put a single number on the page, put a number somewhere on the page. Even an honest one like "most projects fall between €X and €Y" does more for your credibility than the alternative.

How to Show Prices Without Painting Yourself Into a Corner

Here are the shapes I see working on Irish business websites that have stopped fighting this.

Tiered packages. The Bronze / Silver / Gold structure, or however you brand it. Three clear options, each with a fixed price and a stated scope. The customer self-selects. The middle option usually wins. The wider purpose is that the customer leaves the page knowing roughly what working with you looks like.

Starting-from pricing. A single anchor figure with the caveat "from €X for a standard project". Cleanly handles the variation problem without going silent.

Day rates with scope. Good for consultancies, trades, and any service where time is the unit. State the rate, state what a typical day produces, and you have done the work most prospects need to qualify themselves.

The "what is not included" line. This is the bit most pricing pages skip and the bit that builds the most trust. State what the price excludes. A solicitor's "fixed fee for a standard probate, excluding contentious applications" beats a vague "from €X" by a mile.

I once advised a Limerick accountancy firm against putting any price on their website. We thought the bespoke nature of their work made transparency dangerous. Within a year we walked it back. They lost too many inquiries from sole traders who simply wanted to know whether they were in the right ballpark before phoning. We added a starting-from band and a clear scope note, and the inquiry quality improved at the same time as the volume. That one took me longer to admit than it should have.

The Practical Bit Most Owners Miss

The reason a lot of business owners avoid pricing pages is not really about strategy. It is about logistics. They know their prices will change. They do not want to ring a developer every six months to update three numbers on the page. So they leave it off entirely.

That is an infrastructure problem dressed up as a strategy problem. On a properly managed WordPress site, updating a price is a five-minute job done from the same dashboard you use to write the rest of your site. No invoice. No waiting list. No "we'll be able to look at that in three weeks". With Web60's €60-a-year all-inclusive WordPress hosting, the editing tools are part of the platform from day one. The €60 stays the €60. Your prices stay your prices, and they stay editable.

A pricing page is one component of a broader set of trust signals an Irish business website needs to carry, in the same way that the about page is where customers decide whether to trust you in the first place. None of these pages do their job in isolation. Together they decide whether the customer reaches the contact form already half-sold or already on their way to a competitor.

The Honest Close

The "do not put prices on your website" advice is not entirely wrong. It is just very narrowly right, for a small set of businesses, in a specific way that almost nobody applies correctly. Most small Irish businesses would do better with a pricing page that is honest, scoped, and easy to update than with a contact form and the unspoken hope that the customer will ring rather than disappear.

If you are not sure whether your business fits the exception, the test is simple. Open three of your competitors' sites. If any of them show prices, the question is settled. Your customers are comparing already. You are just choosing whether to be in the comparison or out of it.