According to Small Biz trends Book Review of the Art of Pricing:
1. The Nine and Zero Effect. People associate the number nine with value and zero with quality. Look at the difference between fast food and a gourmet restaurant. A burger meal can sell for about $4.99 while a gourmet entree at the best place in town may go for $30. So the psychology of pricing isn’t so much about gaining additional sales because the price appears to be lower, it’s about what the price communicates about your offering. So which do you want to communicate? Value or Quality? Now you can price accordingly.
That’s something I’ve always intutitivly knew but never put into such clear words. It’s part of why the SEO Black Hat Forums were priced at $100 per month and not 99.99.
Quality vs value.

RSS Feed
Twitter
August 20th, 2008
QuadsZilla
Posted in 

That may be right for menus and forums but prices may also be optimized for search. If the thing being priced is to be searched for from among many other things based on its price, then the line between value and quality isn’t the only the only division. The search mechanism may make the searcher choose between 9 and 0 without regard to value or quality and the person doing the pricing should take that into account. Take a real estate search for example. The owner of a house who lists it for sale may need to decide to list it for either $599,000.00 or $600,000.00. On the one hand, it’s only a $1 difference, on the other hand, it is the difference between showing up and not showing up as a result for a search. Listed at $599,999, it may never be found by someone looking at houses priced between $600,000 and $650,000, even though it would certainly be affordable. Listed at $600,000, it may never be found for someone doing a search for houses from $550,000 to $599,999, even though that extra dollar could be dealt with.
[...] Quoted from Small Biz Trends on SEO Black Hat : The Nine and Zero Effect. People associate the number nine with value and zero with quality. Look at the difference between fast food and a gourmet restaurant. A burger meal can sell for about $4.99 while a gourmet entree at the best place in town may go for $30. So the psychology of pricing isn’t so much about gaining additional sales because the price appears to be lower, it’s about what the price communicates about your offering. So which do you want to communicate? Value or Quality? Now you can price accordingly. [...]