Yesterday I came across a discussion spotlighting Atlassian's pricing and order forms. Mike spoke about transparency and pricing on Robert Scoble's ScobleShow CEO Talk and that got people chatting.
At Atlassian, we don't have a 'sales' team. The most efficient way to order our products is online. When you order, instead of checking a box from a pre-existing list or adding to a cart, you select the appropriate product from a drop-down menu on our order form. Separately, there's a simple yet complete pricing table of all the options on the appropriate licensing & pricing page for JIRA and Confluence.
To our knowledge, the order form has worked well for a long time now. That said, let us know your thoughts. What do you think of our order form? Comment to this entry, or join in and voice your opinion to the existing conversation on Joel's conversation page.
5 Comment(s)
I measure an application's, page's or form's efficiency by its clarity and the number of clicks I have to perform a given function.
Scenario:
I have 30 employees, and I need to decide which version of your product to buy. I'm not 100% sure I need 30 licenses, but I want to see pricing.
Actions:
I have to click on several dropdowns just to get to pricing info overview, and even on the last dropdown, I have to click on each one 25, 50 etc. to see the resulting pricing.
Possible Solutions:
1) Add a small table of all pricing above/below form
2) Make the dropdown of Team (50 Users) etc. show Team (50u / $xxxx) so that I can view all of them from one click on that dropdown.
By Mark at October 17, 2006 3:33 AM
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Mark. Also, thanks for those good solutions. I'll share them with the team.
Cheers! Laurel
By Laurel at October 17, 2006 6:35 AM
Just to chime in, I think this is a good point, too. Because we're going to be offering several new products soon, we're going to have review our order form in light of giving more information at a glance.
By Jon Silvers at October 17, 2006 10:13 AM
I'm not sure that I agree with you Mark. On Atlassian's website (unlike many other websites), we actually have a 'pricing' page.
If you take our order page, and assume the function is 'look up the price', then you are correct - it takes a few too many clicks.
However, most of our customers *know* what they are ordering when they order it. They have downloaded and installed the software, and in many cases, gone through the purchasing department to get approval.
If you take the function of 'order our software' on the purchase page, then it is extremely efficient.
It's also interesting that we haven't once had a complaint from someone actually ordering :)
By Scott Farquhar at October 17, 2006 11:29 AM
The complaint those users seem to repeat is that they cannot easily compare price options; they're actually looking for the Pricing page. That issue could be resolved by, for example, putting the relevant links in a next box below the actual pricing selection with "Compare all prices for [JIRA], [Confluence]"
By David Soul at October 17, 2006 12:41 PM