Is there a way to get my website to show different prices based on location?
Here in South Africa the pricing of website is significantly less than what I would charge to overseas clients, e.g $1,000 for a basic website would seem reasonable in the US but that would be the price for a fully blown website in South Africa (R16,000. A basic website in SA would be R6,000 or less which is $375). I am trying to get the website to show different prices depending on the location so the SA clients don’t get the wrong idea. since my agencies services cater to different clients worldwide, I am trying to minimise it by creating two separate sites.
Hi @Matthew_Rissik.
Josh with Foxy here. Are you wanting to allow purchases (in the country specific pricing) as well? Or just need help with price display?
It’s important to realize that there are both technical and design challenges here;
Good, reliable location detection. There are a lot of GeoIP services, and the good ones cost. Even the best ones are maybe 90% accurate, and e.g. phones might be way off. Even Google does not have this nut cracked, and they’ve probably invested more than anyone in location detection since that’s their most powerful marketing demographic.
Easy switching of your location-context if the site detect incorrectly.
Not too easy switching, because then people will price-compare, and hack your pricing model.
Search engines. If you allow Google to index your pricing page, which version will it index? Customers may see excerpts of your pricing for another market in the search results, or in the google cache or the Wayback machine.
The way larger companies like Audible handle this is to have regional sites, e.g. Audible Australia, Audible US, Audible Europe, and when you hit any of them, a location detector encourages you to switch sites to your detected region. It then cookies you to remember your setting for future visits.
That’s powerful, and allows for very different regional pricing models- particularly because sites like Audible localize the “stores”. If I’m a US customer, I can’t buy from the AUS store even though the item I want is cheaper there.
But that’s a big system build. Realistically, I’d go for a simpler approach, where there is no public pricing. Customers get pricing through one of two methods…
Customers enquire, and you send them the pricing sheet for their region.
Customers setup an account, e.g. Webflow Memberships or Memberstack, and then based on the location they’ve selected at sign on (which cannot be changed by them), they see a different pricing page in the members-only area.
Neither of these require location detection. The second approach could benefit from it during the sign-up process, but it’s not strictly necessary.
These kinds of systems are a lot of fun to build. Feel free to message if you can use some help.
The easiest way would just be to make a dropdown so visitors can select their country - although, you can make this happen automatically with a tool like Google Optimize!
hey @memetican - this is some great advice. However - in our case, the client (in the car detailing industry)'s goal for their new website is to have a car part price list page that is visible publicly to small retailers etc, but also a parts price list page that is only accessible to major dealers and has custom discounted pricing. The parts that are sold will be the same across both public and dealer pages. Would this still be achievable using your suggested method number 2 if the product in question is actually a physical one which is directly purchasable through the site?
If you can cleanly identify the customer’s price group using Memberstack. or Memberships ( with a lot of extra code ), then it’s not difficult to determine and display custom pricing for that group.
You’d have to decide how secure that needs to be because in a basic setup that date would generally be in the page, and then make visible with code.
However whether this would work with a check-out and payment process, depends heavily on the ECom system you’re using.
Can’t say, I’d have to do a bit of r&d and unpack your setup.
The main challenge would be determining whether you can change the price of products and have that work all the way through checkout.
Normally, a decent ECom system would prevent that as it could be easily hacked. I’ll take that coat for $1 please. But worth trying.
Your alternative is to create different versions of the same product at different pricing, and then just show the relevant ones by writing custom code to filter your views. Not secure, but possible.
