Running a pay-what-you-can shop
Sliding-scale pricing that works, and the three ways it goes wrong.
Pay-what-you-can means one product, several prices, and the buyer choosing. Done badly it looks like a begging bowl and makes nobody comfortable. Done well it raises more money than a fixed price, and the people who cannot afford it get the thing anyway. The difference is entirely in how you set it up.
1. Offer tiers, not an open box
An empty "pay what you like" field makes people freeze — nobody knows what is polite. Give three or four named options with a real anchor price instead. A workable shape:
| Tier | What it signals | Typical position |
|---|---|---|
| Supported | You need help to access this | 40–60% of the base price |
| Standard | This is what it costs to make | The base price |
| Supporting | You are covering someone else too | 150–200% of the base price |
Three tiers is enough. Five makes the decision work. Never make the low tier feel like a lesser product — same file, same access, same delivery.
2. Anchor the middle tier honestly
Your "standard" price must be the true cost of producing and delivering the thing, not a number you invented to make the top tier look generous. If standard is not honest, the whole structure reads as a manipulation and the supporting tier stops selling. Write the sentence on the page: "The standard price is what it costs us to make and send this."
3. Say who the low tier is for
Vague generosity causes anxiety — people who can pay worry they are cheating, and people who cannot worry they will be judged. Name it plainly:
"Choose the supported price if you are a student, unwaged, between work, or funding this out of your own pocket. Choose the supporting price if your organisation is paying, or you simply want someone else to have this. Both get exactly the same thing, at the same speed."
4. Do not ask anyone to justify themselves
No forms, no "tell us why", no means-testing, no proof. The moment access requires an explanation, everyone who needs it disappears. Self-selection is the entire mechanism; if you cannot trust the buyer to choose, do not run a sliding scale.
The three ways it goes wrong
Death by choice. Six tiers, a donation slider and a tip box on the same page. Every extra decision loses buyers. One product, three prices, one button.
The shameful low tier. Calling it "concession", "hardship" or "discount" tells the buyer they are a charity case. Call it what it is: supported.
Nothing comes back. If the organisation never publishes what the sliding scale paid for — new stock, more sessions, a pay rise for staff — support collapses in the second year. Say where the money went, once a year, in numbers.
If you sell through a shop system
Most checkout software charges one price per product, so groups end up making three near-identical products and a mess of stock keeping. A cleaner way is a single product with the tiers presented as a choice at checkout, which is what a sliding-scale checkout add-on for WordPress does. If your shop cannot do it, three product records with identical delivery and the tier in the title works perfectly well — it is untidy, not wrong.
How to tell it is working
- More than about 10% of buyers choose the supported tier — otherwise the low price is hidden, unclear, or still too high.
- At least 10% choose the supporting tier — otherwise nobody believes the cause.
- Total income per unit beats your old fixed price. If it does not after three months, your standard price was too low to begin with.
Free to copy, adapt and pass on. Corrections to [email protected].