Distributors and manufacturers: publishing prices when every client has their own
Publishing your prices is not a binary choice. Four models exist, from public pricing to price on request, and two criteria are enough to decide: the real price variability between your clients and the cost of producing a quote. Hidden pricing is only free when it is a choice.
- The question "can we publish our prices" is the wrong one. The right question is which of the four price visibility models fits your margin structure.
- Two criteria decide it: the real price gap between your best and worst client, and what it costs to produce a priced quote.
- Gartner measures that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free purchasing journey, in a survey of 646 buyers conducted in fall 2025.
- Hidden pricing shifts the cost onto estimating: you lose billable time every time a priced quote serves only to give a ballpark figure.
- The worst model is inconsistency: a silent site and a rep who quotes a different price depending on who is asking. Gartner measures that 69% of buyers notice gaps between the site and the salesperson's message.
On this page
What is price visibility
Price visibility is the degree of pricing information a company makes accessible before any sales contact. It comes in four models: published public pricing, pricing tied to the client account, a published indicative range, and price on request. The choice is a business decision, not a technical constraint. It depends on the real price variability between clients and the cost of producing a priced quote.
The question is the wrong one
What follows is written for distributors, manufacturers and service companies that sell to professional buyers with prices negotiated by account. If your prices are public and identical for everyone, the question does not apply to you.
"We can't put our prices online, every client has their own." That sentence kills more B2B online sales projects than every technical obstacle combined. It gets said in a meeting, nobody challenges it, and the project turns back into a brochure.
It actually answers a binary question nobody asked: publish or don't publish is not the choice in front of you. The real choice is about the degree of information you make accessible before a buyer talks to anyone, and there are four positions on that scale, not two.
Behind that sentence are three distinct fears, and they do not have the same answers. The fear that competitors see your prices. The fear that one client learns another pays less. The fear of committing to a price you cannot honour on a configured product. Each is handled separately, and two of the three are handled without ever publishing a firm price.
The four price visibility models
| Model | What a visitor sees | When it applies | What it costs to get wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public pricing | The firm price, like in retail | Price gap between clients under 10%, standard product, stable catalogue | You lose the margin from accounts that used to pay more, and you pull the whole market down |
| Account-based pricing | Nothing before login, their negotiated price after | Recurring client base, existing pricing agreement, significant repeat-order volume | You become invisible to every new buyer, and you fund acquisition that runs straight into a wall |
| Indicative range | A stated ballpark figure, with its conditions | Configured product, price depends on dimensions, volume or finish | A range too wide qualifies nobody, a range too narrow creates an expectation the quote will betray |
| Price on request | No numerical indication | One-off contract, RFP, strategically confidential price | You pay in estimating time what you save in confidentiality, and you lose the buyers in a hurry |
Most companies believe they are at model four when they could be at model three. That is the most profitable conversation to have before rebuilding a site.
The two criteria that decide
Two numbers are enough, and you can find them in your sales data in half a day.
First criterion: the real price gap between your clients. Pull the unit price paid by your best account and your worst account on your best-selling product, over the last twelve months. If the gap is 8%, public pricing is workable and the fear is theoretical. If the gap is 45%, it is not, and the range becomes the only honest option.
Second criterion: the cost of producing a quote. Count the real estimating hours, at the real rate, on an average quote. Four hours at $85 comes to $340. That number decides everything that follows, because it determines how many unnecessary quotes your current model makes you produce.
Crossing the two gives the answer. Low gap and cheap quote: public pricing. Low gap and costly quote: public pricing or a range, to filter upstream. Wide gap and cheap quote: account-based pricing, with a range for new buyers. Wide gap and costly quote: an indicative range, without exception, because it is the only model that qualifies before you spend estimating time.
The "price on request" model does not appear as the default choice in any of the four crossings. It is justified for a one-off contract or an RFP, never for a recurring product. Many companies apply it everywhere out of habit, not decision.
What hidden pricing actually costs
Hidden pricing looks free because its cost never shows up on an accounting line. It shows up elsewhere, in three items nobody links back to the site.
The first is the estimating time spent on buyers who only wanted a ballpark figure. Take the arithmetic again: a hundred requests received, sixty of them from people who wanted to know if your product fit their budget before going any further. At $340 a quote, that is $20,400 of estimating time spent producing information that three lines on a page would have given them.
The second is the delay. Every quote produced adds days to the journey. In a market where the buyer is comparing three suppliers, the one that gives an immediate ballpark figure gets into the shortlist while the other two are still estimating.
The third is missing out on comparisons. A buyer building a shortlist, increasingly with the help of an assistant, keeps the suppliers whose positioning they can place. A supplier with no price indication at all is hard to rank, so it is easy to drop. Gartner also measures that 45% of buyers surveyed in fall 2025 report having used artificial intelligence during a recent purchase.
The real risk is not the price, it's the gap
The fear is almost always about publishing, when the real risk sits elsewhere. Gartner measures that 69% of B2B buyers notice gaps between the information published on a supplier's site and what its rep tells them, in a survey of 632 buyers conducted in fall 2024.
The buyer does not penalize you for a high price, but for an inconsistency, because it forces them to wonder which of the two sources is lying. On a considered purchase, that doubt costs you dearly.
A silent site and five reps each quoting a different range from memory is the worst of all models. It protects nothing, since the prices circulate anyway, and it destroys trust every time a gap is caught. Publishing a stated range that everyone sticks to protects your margin better than a silence that lets everyone improvise.
Your prices already circulate. Your competitors get them from buyers, from former employees and from lost RFPs. Price confidentiality in B2B rarely protects against competitors. What it mainly protects against is comparison between your own clients, and that is a sales-policy question, not a website one.
Publishing a range without binding yourself
The indicative range is the model that fits the most companies, and it is also the one most often executed poorly. Four rules make it workable.
A range always carries a reference configuration. A price that does not say what it buys is unusable. Name the dimensions, the volume, the finish and what is excluded.
The width is calibrated for qualification, not for caution. A range from $15,000 to $90,000 filters nobody and loses the whole benefit of the exercise. Segment by configuration instead of widening it.
The factors that move the price are named. Three to five factors are enough. That is what turns a range into a qualification tool, because the buyer places themselves on it.
The validity date is displayed and respected. A dated range revised twice a year holds up. A 2023 range still online destroys trust faster than no price at all.
The same numbers then need to exist in the sales materials. A published range that reps ignore recreates exactly the gap you were trying to avoid.
On complex configurations, the alternative to showing a price is often the configurator, which qualifies without committing to an amount.
What to decide before rebuilding your site
The decision is commercial and belongs in leadership, not in a web project meeting. A vendor who makes it for you puts your margin on the line without carrying the risk.
- What price gap separates your best account from your worst account on your best-selling product?
- How much does producing a priced quote cost you, in real hours at the real rate?
- Out of a hundred requests received, how many were looking for a ballpark figure rather than a firm quote?
- Who is authorized to quote a price today, and do the five people involved give the same figure?
- If the published range has not reduced the number of unnecessary quotes within nine months, what changes, and who makes that call?
The answer that holds up gives percentage gaps and estimating hours. A vague answer talks about confidentiality and client relationships. A vendor who recommends a pricing model without ever asking about your margin is not recommending anything, they are applying a habit.
Settling this kind of question with your numbers in front of us is exactly what we do in a paid audit.
What is yours to own: the decision on the pricing model, the price gap allowed between accounts, and the discipline of reps on the quoted figure. What does get delegated: analyzing the sales data to calculate the two criteria, the page structure, the wording of the conditions, and measuring the number of unnecessary quotes avoided. A company willing to pull its real price gaps gets a decision in two weeks. A company that refuses walks away with a site that says "contact us," and it already had one of those.
Building the budget that carries these decisions is detailed in building the marketing budget.
Turning a showcase site into a tool that qualifies before the call is at the heart of the Improve your site's conversion goal.
Your catalogue is large and the pricing question comes up by product family? See our work in ecommerce.
Frequently asked questions about publishing B2B prices
Will my competitors use my prices against me?
They probably know them already. In B2B, prices circulate through buyers, former employees and lost RFPs. Price confidentiality mainly protects against comparison between your own clients, which is a matter of sales policy. If your advantage rests solely on the fact that nobody knows your prices, that is the advantage worth examining.
Does a range commit me legally?
A range clearly presented as indicative, with its reference configuration, its variation factors and its validity date, does not constitute a firm offer. The precision of the wording matters, and a legal review of your language is a modest investment. What creates a risk is not the publication, it is a vague range that a buyer could reasonably read as a promise.
What if my prices change often?
That is an argument for the range, not against it. A dated range, revised twice a year, absorbs a variation that a firm price cannot absorb. If your costs move enough that a half-yearly range becomes inaccurate, state the variation factor rather than the amount, for example indexing to a raw material price.
Is account-based pricing enough?
For your existing clients, yes, and it is the right model on repeat orders. For acquisition, no. A new buyer who lands on a catalogue with no price and no account has nothing to make them stay. The complete model combines account-based pricing for open accounts and a public range for everyone else.
How do I know if my current model is costing me anything?
Measure two numbers over a quarter. The number of quotes produced that led to no follow-up, and the estimating time they consumed. The product of the two is the annual cost of your model. If it exceeds what publishing a range would have cost, the question is settled.
What if leadership refuses any publication?
Start with one product family, the most standard one, with a wide, dated range, for six months. Measure the number of unnecessary quotes avoided and the reaction from existing clients, which is almost always none. A decision like this is won with a measured result, not with an argument.
- Gartner, Gartner Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience, press release of March 9, 2026, survey of 646 B2B buyers conducted from August to September 2025.
- Gartner, Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience, press release of June 25, 2025, survey of 632 B2B buyers conducted from August to September 2024. Source of the 69% figure on gaps between the site and the rep.
- Falia working framework, arithmetic on the cost of producing a quote. The amounts are explicit scenarios, to be replaced with your own rates.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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