Pricing Psychology

I'm seeing more and more info-products priced with a 7 at the end.

Lucky number 7, I guess???

The "price ending in 7" thing started with a direct marketer/copywriter named Ted Nicholas. He wrote that in one test he did, the price ending in 7 outperformed the price ending in 9.

Several years of "Chinese Whispers" have turned that into "prices ending in 7 always outperform everything else."

As for $9.99 out-pulling $10 or $10.00, much of that can be attributed to adding another digit to the price. That's why you see houses listed at $99,900 rather than $100,000. Once you get to $100k, you're in six-digit territory.

I once read about a guy that was killing it with a "Dollar Store" until someone opened the "99 cent store" across the street.

The magic isn't in the number itself, it's in the relationship of that number to others in the marketplace. Don't try to guess the "perfect price" at launch. Test different price points until you find the one that delivers the results you want, be that volume or profit per unit or net profit.

Interesting question and answers.
Looking at it from a different approach. The subconscious could interpret several things from the 9.99 versus the round number 10.
Such as an attempt to sell rather than provide.
Ever get a birthday card check for $9.99? Maybe from your uncle, if he's a car dealer Or is it always a generous round number?
Retail usually goes the .99 route though, so that tells me something about their research results.

Another approach is to focus on pre-framing the price, with content mention of higher priced products (of the competitions perhaps). Or just stating high dollar numbers in general in your copy, related to your subject. When they reach your offer price, it will strike the mind as small by comparison - whether it's 9.99 or 10.00.

If you don't have the opportunity to pre-frame, then I'd stick with the retail practices. They put a lot of money into research.

John