How to raise prices without losing customers? (Hair Extensions Wholesaler Edition)

If there’s one significant trend that clearly stands out for many of our wholesale customers, it is the upward trend of hair extensions price. Luxshine’s price list, unfortunately, is no exception. And we all feel the pressure that the new price set on countless small business owners and resellers across the board.

This pressure feels even more tangible when the cost is rising on all fronts for a business owner. We’re not just talking about the hair prices. These adjustments all happen during a global pandemic that affects not just the global human hair supply chain, but also the health of most people’s businesses. While most hair vendors seem to indicate that this trend is not reversing backward soon, what can we do amidst these developments? 

Which is why we think it’s highly the time you can retain and develop your client base amidst the upward trend of hair prices. How do you formulate your pricing schemes and grow your business without keeping your prices unbearably low? How can you invest and use your revenue to find and cultivate new markets? Let’s all find out

Put your client’s relationship as a top priority

As business people, you might have already done all you could to prioritize your client, but as the prices continue to rise, the relationship between you and your client can become shaky. As the quantity of hair your client’s budget can buy slowly declines, as well as shrinking budget due to many factors, they might start to reevaluate you as a reseller. 

This is why, more than ever, you need to start putting more and more interest and time into your clients. Get in touch with your clients, talk, and keep them engaged. Inquire your clients to know all of their current problems and how you can come up with solutions. Besides keeping a line of contact, you should employ a few other techniques to help your clients remember and value your service. Some of these techniques don’t require any money spent while others would need you to be decisive in setting prices and policy.

Create Surprise, Unexpected Offerings

While the hair prices show no sign of slowing down, the last thing you should do is to hold on to the same old price or be stuck with the old pricing schemes. Now more than ever, you need to rethink your pricing strategy and make some further adjustments. However, there might be an old batch of hair that you get at a previously lower price or on a special discount occasion. You can use this opportunity to create a temporary discount program to engage your client. Of course, the term and time period applied for this program should be made clear. It helps to make your clients feel like you treasure them and want to help them advance in their career. However, at no point should you try to race to the bottom in terms of price. You should calculate the price at the most reasonable level to ensure profitability while having intermittent sale-off occasions when you get good deals from your suppliers.

Review Your Shipping Prices

Now talking about pricing schemes, it inevitably comes to shipping costs. Now, you may currently offer free shipping to all of your clients, but this will of course hurt your profitability. In times like this, you may need to revamp how you factor in the shipping cost to your final price. Do you want to offer your client free shipping while upping the price a bit or do you want to keep things separate so that your hair prices remain low? Another adjustment you might need to go through is to review your 3PL and courier service provider. Maybe you can add cheaper shipping options to your shipping choice or opt for a slower, more affordable service.

Review Your Return Policy

Now shipping is an integral part of your fulfillment process. However, the fulfillment process doesn’t end once your client gets their hair package. The final stage of the fulfillment process is handling returns and refunds. It is exactly at times like this that you need to upgrade your refund and return policy. The return and refund policy should reflect your priority on putting the customer first while not putting you at unjustifiable risk. 

The way you word things should leave an impression that you care a lot for your client’s interest and you prioritize their business while making sure all the terms and conditions are fair and clear. Leaving no room for confusion while emphasizing your commitment to transparency and servitude is a huge plus for your customer.

Lower Your Minimum Order Quantity

While MOQ is helpful in helping you ensure that your customer base is made up of wholesale clients, you might need to consider lowering your MOQ precondition. As you transition to a lower MOQ requirement, you will let your clients be able to keep on buying your hair but in a smaller total amount. This helps your clients get through this tough time and allows them to place smaller orders.

Offer New Payment Plan To Help Stabilize Price

While you adjust your pricing and bear the volatility of the market, have you ever thought of coming up with a payment plan? Many Buy now, pay later services like Sezzle or Quadpay exist to help your client get their stock interest-free. Either rely on these services and let the customer receive the hair right away or you can introduce your own layaway plan. This kind of plan allows clients to deposit money toward the final amount. Once they have paid the total sum, they can collect their order. This practice helps your client reserve the product in stock while ensuring the price is set and solidified no matter what the future holds. 

All of the suggestions above help your clients get more flexibility. This helps converts your existing customers into a loyal client base because they love all the flexibility and options that you provide.

Work With Your Supplier So There Is No Unexpected Price Pump

While your hair vendor can and might increase its price in the future, make sure that you get a timely notice when such things happen. This is something you should make sure of so that you are always proactive when you plan for your order and budget. You never want to wake up to the news of a new price once you place your order. You should set up an agreement with your hair vendor that they will push timely notice to you, ideally before they apply their new price.

If you feel like such an agreement might not be feasible or it may fall through the cracks, you should set up a recurring schedule to check on the hair prices. While nobody wants to see hair prices rise, you absolutely don’t want to know this info just when you are about to place an order.

Know What’s Up With Your Competition

As we all have a niche market that we specialize in, any business owner would have an ideal type of client in their head. Now, as you locate your ideal clients, do you know the kind of company and hair stores that operate within and target the same niche? What is some strategy that people are taking when the price hike keeps coming up? Sometimes, your client’s move might be the best way to take inspiration from and find ways to level up your business. We’re not talking about simply copying all of their moves. Finding your strength and weakness and understanding your position is the key to win over clients in your niche as well as expanding to new markets.

Raising prices without losing customers

So above are our suggestions to help you deal with the rising trend of hair prices. As a business person, your pricing scheme and business decisions have to be based on numbers. After all, whether you can keep your clients or not is based a lot on your product and service quality. It’s not simply just how much your clients are paying but also the intangible values that your clientscareershelps helpetting. With a strong suite of services, beautiful hair quality, and a strong business relationship, we think these are the cornerstones that would help you build your client’s loyalty.