The high pricing is intentional. If no-one is buying then I can just bring the price down, while it is really difficult to move on the other direction if I start with a low value.
High. It's easier to make it cheaper if you're too high than higher if you are too low. Also, everyone wants a deal so when you have high prices it's easy to discount. A high price also communicates value.
Price is generally the last thing considered, convince your users to want your product and the only people who won't buy it are those that can't afford it. Pricing is an art, not a science, start high and work down.
Bottom line...something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. It is better to initially price too high than too low. It is easy to lower a price but extremely hard to increase it. Go high and be willing to negotiate.
To some buyers anyway. It's not really clear that a higher price ends up being the revenue/income maximizing price (if the cost is minimal and many buyers value it much lower than the high price).
My guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.
Because the high price scares everyone away except for the customers you really want to focus on. That’s at least the theory you hear in many Ycombinator lectures.
You have to pick a price for high end low volume products and that price often ends up containing a whole lot of development and overhead costs. You can cut corners with development and materials and lose the high end to try for volume, you can try to get your thing very popular, or you can just stick to high prices. High prices tends to get you a better customer base and a sense of exclusivity which drives sales.
This. It's the Craigslist pricing conundrum. Everyone prices stupidly high because they're basing their pricing on what's on the market and everything else on the market is priced stupidly high which is why it's on the market and not sold in the first place.
I would venture that sellers overwhelmingly prefer stable prices to increasing prices. Rising prices require adjustment, which requires resources, and makes you the focus of customers' ire for what amounted to trying to keep things running the same. Meanwhile, any seller raising prices is setting up for a short- or long-term substitution effect away from their products.
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