STRATEGY
July 2026 · 7 min read · Aymeric Julien, Co-founder
5 Pricing mistakes costing your business revenue
Most companies price their most important decision on their least reliable input: a guess.
Most businesses build their product on rigorous data and price it on a guess. Months of development, then a number that feels right.
That number is expensive. McKinsey research found that a 1 percent price improvement lifts operating profit by roughly 8 percent, more than the equivalent gain in volume or cost. No other commercial lever comes close, and no other lever gets less research. Here are the five mistakes we see most often, and what fixes each one.
Mistake 1: Pricing on gut feel instead of data
Your team is too close to the product to price it. They see the effort behind every feature. Buyers see none of that. They see a problem, a shelf, and three alternatives.
Internal pricing debates settle on whoever argues loudest. Research replaces the debate with evidence: what your market values, what it will pay, and where demand drops off.
The fix: measure willingness to pay before the meeting, not during it. A Van Westendorp study answers the basic question in weeks.
Mistake 2: Copying your competitors
Your competitor's price reflects their cost structure, their portfolio, and their strategy. None of those are yours. And in most categories, their number was a guess too.
Anchoring to the competition also does quiet damage. It trains buyers to compare you on price alone. If your product is worth more, matching their price gives that value away.
The fix: use competitive prices as context, not as the answer. Conjoint analysis puts your product against competitors in realistic choice scenarios and shows what your differences are actually worth.
Mistake 3: Building too many tiers and pack options
Complexity kills conversion. Give buyers too many options and they defer the decision, which in practice means no.
The instinct behind option overload is honest. Different segments want different things. But segments are served by a few well-chosen offers, not a wall of checkboxes.
The fix: let the data pick the lineup. MaxDiff ranks what buyers value most. Conjoint shows which combinations of features and price win choices. Three researched options beat ten assembled ones.
Mistake 4: Never measuring willingness to pay
Value is subjective. Willingness to pay is measurable. If you have never measured it, you are guessing in both directions: an entry price that may be costing you volume and a premium offer that may be underpriced.
Willingness to pay also moves. Inflation, category shifts, and competitor launches all reshape what buyers will accept. A measure from two years ago describes a market that no longer exists.
The fix: treat willingness to pay as a number you track, not a study you ran once.
Mistake 5: Setting the price once and forgetting it
Your product improves. Costs shift. Competitors reposition. Your price sits still through all of it.
Every one of those changes is a pricing event, and most companies respond to none of them. The result is a slow leak. Margin given away where buyers would pay more. Volume lost where the price crept past acceptance.
The fix: build a trigger list. Cost shocks, competitor moves, major product changes, and annual planning should each prompt a pricing review backed by fresh data, not a copy of last year's number.
Work with Relumi
Each of these mistakes has the same root: pricing decisions made without evidence. The research to fix them costs less than the revenue they leak.
Every pricing question is different. We choose the method that fits yours, run the study, and walk you through the decision. One point of contact, start to finish. Clear answers in 30 days.
