Tom Morkes is an expert at Pay What You Want pricing. In fact, he wrote a book on it. PWYW pricing lets the consumer choose the price to pay for the product or service.

What is the most important thing you can share about pricing?

* Pricing is marketing.

* How you price your products and services is part of marketing, and therefore part of the sales process.

* Pricing is essential early in the process, while you are developing a product or service.

What is Pay What You Want pricing?

* Pay What You Want pricing lets the consumer/buyer decide the price of the product or service.

* It doesn’t work with commodities.

* Marketing is more important with Pay What You Want pricing.

* Some people will pay you more if you remove the fixed price.

* The Vennare Brothers’ The Hybrid Athlete inspired Tom’s interest in this pricing method.

* It is not relegated to products, but can also work with services.

* If you can’t express the value you are offering, this pricing method will not work.

* Price anchoring is an important marketing technique for this method.

* A blank space for people to put in any number is not the best option for more expensive products and services.

* If you remove the caps (low and high), people will pay you more than you think they will. It will also remove the barrier to entry on the bottom end.

* You have to be comfortable that some are going to pay less, but a small percent will pay dramatically more, offsetting the lower buyers.

* You need to rely on the people who are generous to sustain you, which is a smaller percentage of the buyers.

How does Pay What You Want compare to other price concepts?

* Crowd Funding is different from Pay What You Want, but they are similar and can learn from each other.

* How do you show someone the value?

* How do you encourage them to be generous?

* Value Pricing and Pay What You Want use tiers or options.

* TIP (To Insure Performance) is a combination of Value Pricing and Pay What You Want. TIP is similar to how bartenders and waiters price.

* Pay What You Want Invoicing – Send a blank invoice and let the customer choose what to pay.

* Experiment and try it out on small projects, like charging for parts and letting the customer pay what they want for service.

* Some examples of Pay What You Want Pricing

* Storyline Conference

* Humble Bundle

* Half Elf, by Mika Epstein, is doing a bit of everything.

* Gumroad is an ecommerce site that supports Pay What You Want well.

About Tom Morkes

* U.S. Army Veteran, who served in Iraq

* Attended a 2-day workshop with Seth Godin

* Author of The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing

* Founder of Insurgent Publishing

* Graduate of the West Point

* TomMorkes.com