We’ve been working in project for a Web Hosting client. After doing a few wireframes, we realized that we had to find good references to the pricing page. A good table just pops out in the middle of the layout, and makes it unique.

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So, I had to find some examples of Pricing tables to use as reference, so I spent my afternoon looking for these… we even had some kind people helping us at Twitter (thanks guys). So, here are the ones that we got to get together. I hope you enjoy it!

Media Temple

LightCMS

Squarespace

Wufoo

Backboard

HiTask

Gloss

Shopify

SlideDeck

Check the link for full view.

Big Cartel

The Invoice Machine

Newsberry

Pulse

Ballpark

MailChimp

The Resumator

Highrise

Web Notes

Crazy Egg

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Photo by Shermeee.

Once upon a time people took photos and dutifully carted their film down to the photo shop to get developed, waiting to see how the photos turned out. Now people immediately check whether or not the shot was good on the display of their digital camera, and more often than not stuff the photos onto their hard drives or upload them to their Flickr accounts, but never get around to actually printing them and preserving them in a physical form. If you’ve been meaning to get around to printing more photos and saving them from their fate of digital obscurity, the following five Lifehacker reader-selected sites can help you.

For the sake of consistency among the pricing notes, each site’s price will be listed as the current price (as of 1/17/2010) for one 4×6 and one 8×10, two of the most common U.S. photographic print sizes and good indicators of the overall pricing scheme at the site. Pricing is only one element of photo printing, however, and we would strongly suggest reading our notes here and checking out the individual sites before selecting one over the other based on a few cent price difference.

It’s also worth noting that reviewing photo-printing services is very similar to reviewing, say, netbook computers. The end products are so similar to each other that the real test of whether or not you like one photo service over another photo service is to upload a couple photos and see if the little things—like the bulk uploader, the built-in editing tools, and the ordering interface—are features you are comfortable with—just like something as small as the keyboard spacing can make or break a netbook purchase.

Snapfish ($0.09/$2.99)

Snapfish is the most generous of the photo printing sites in the Hive Five. They offer 50 free 4×6 photos to first time customers—and have done so for years—so it’s a great place to start when trying out different photo sites. They also have some of the lowest pricing on basic prints, like glossy 4x6s, you’ll find anywhere. Snapfish also offers a happy medium between storing and ordering prints online and sometimes wanting or needing them immediately. Snapfish allows you to order your prints for delivery through the mail or for in-store pickup at stores like Walgreen’s, Walmart, or Meijer. Snapfish has an upload tool called PictureMover that will auto-detect when your camera or camera card is inserted into your computer and optionally upload the photos to a new album. Snapfish has—rather confusing—tiered pricing for every product they offer. Rather than even attempt to decode their shipping tables, you should always stop by RetailMeNot and grab a “free shipping” coupon code—Snapfish is almost perpetually running free shipping deals.

Shutterfly ($0.15/$3.99)

Shutterfly doesn’t offer rock bottom prices compared to other online outfits—although for small prints they are certainly reasonable—but it does shine with the most polished organizing and sharing system of the sites featured here today. It’s obvious a lot of time and thought was put into making it really easy to share photos and prints with friends and family. Although Shutterfly doesn’t offer a variety of pickup locations like Snapfish, you can order prints through Shutterfly for pickup at Target stores that have in-house photo processing. Shutterfly also has tiered—albeit less confusing—shipping rates which start at $1.79 for basic shipping and rise accordingly. You can view them here.

Mpix ($0.29/$1.99)

MPix offers a wide variety of print sizes (25+) and a diverse portfolio of additional services like mounting on standouts and canvas printing. They also, unlike some of the cheaper outfits, offer silver-based black and white printing to help digital photographers really show off their black and white prints in a more authentic way. MPix, unlike many other online photo services, also deals in film, but the price per exposure for development, scanning, and uploading to your MPix albums is $0.19 per exposure—we cringe to think what an 8GB SD card would cost to process at the film-rate. Shipping starts at $3.00 per order, additional rates are available here.

AdoramaPix ($0.19/$1.28)

AdoramaPix is the photo processing division of the enormous Adorama photography store—offering photo development services for photographers was a natural extension of their retail business. They offer the largest selection of photo paper of any contender in the Hive Five. You can select from seven different papers including those from the Kodak Endura line, Kodak Metallic, and True B&W for better black and white photos. Adorama offers 25 free 4×6 prints with every new account. Shipping is $2.95 for 50 prints of 5×7 size and under, $4.99 for any size prints of any quantity. Additional shipping rates detailed here.

Costco Photocenter ($0.13/$1.49)

Many people use Costco for printing because of the convenience of uploading their prints and then picking them up later that day at Costco while doing their shopping. The strong point of Costco’s printing services is definitely a combination of reasonable pricing and in-store pickup. The mail-order side of things isn’t a strong point with longer-than-average shipping times and lack-luster support. That said, if you’re already a Costco customer and you’re looking for convenient pickup without a heavy emphasis on print or paper variety, it’s an easy sell. Shipping is free for 4×6 prints, variable pricing for larger prints.

Which Photo Printing Service Is Best?(polls)

Have an experience with one of the above vendors—or bummed your favorite didn’t make the list? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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The world of professional photography has come a long way since the days of the darkroom and Ektachrome film. Although there are traditionalists who still swear by film photography, advances in technology have brought photography to a whole new level, both in process and product. In addition to innovation in photography equipment, there are many valuable resources online that are becoming essential tools for professional photographers.

Everything in a photographer’s world can now be managed online, including content, rights, business processes and client relations, to name a few. Aside from shooting the actual photographs, the Internet has made it possible for the rest of the business to be handled from the comforts of the studio with a few clicks of the mouse.

The following are five essential web sites for pros:

1. LiveBooks

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LiveBooks provides professional photographers (and other creatives) a powerful platform for establishing their web presence. By providing a wide array of beautifully custom-designed or pre-designed web sites, liveBooks offers the ability to easily manage content and a business online. LiveBooks also comes with a powerful SEO engine for maximizing web traffic, as well as the ability to analyze the click-through behavior of visitors.

Pricing: $39 per month

2. ShootQ

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ShootQ is the Internet equivalent of a studio manager. As a completely web-based studio management solution for photographers, ShootQ is an online repository for client/vendor information, invoicing, contracts and more. Photographers can also take advantage of the automated reminder function for requesting payment from clients.

Pricing: Starts at $39.95 per month

3. Animoto

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Animoto is an award-winning web application that enables photographers to seamlessly turn a series of photographs into a dynamic video presentation. Created by TV and film producers, Animoto utilizes state-of-the-art technology to mimic the same quality you would expect from the silver screen. The service also offers a music library of more than 500+ commercially licensed songs to accompany videos.

Pricing: $249 for 1 year, or $99 for a 3-month trial   

4. LicenseStream

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For any photographer who intends to use his/her work for stock photography purposes, LicenseStream is a site to consider. By keeping tabs on all licensed content, photographers can rest assured that their work is appropriately credited and paid for whenever it is used. LicenseStream also provides photographers with more autonomy over their own work, rather than relying upon stock agency representation.

Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per year for a standard account

5. LabPrints

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There’s a saying in the business that a photographer is only as good as his or her lab. If that’s the case, LabPrints should be in every photographer’s bookmarks because it links them to professional labs around the country. The software also enables photographers to organize images, design layouts and albums and upload orders directly to the lab of their choosing through its LP Digital Studio software.

Pricing: This software is free, but additional services are fee-based

More small business resources from Mashable:

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- Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Small Businesses
- 9 Great Document Collaboration Tools for Teams
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Retain Customers
- Top Mobile Productivity Tools for the Small Business
- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, wibs24

Tags: business, List, Lists, photography, Photos

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Price is not the major factor in selling, but what I am talking about is how you describe your pricing structure to your customers. You may not know it, but we all have an internal ‘measuring stick’ for how we interact with each other when buying and selling.

A great example of this is in the Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill who is mistaken for a CIA agent and at one point in the film he is in an auction house surrounded by the ‘bad guys’ who are waiting to grab him.

To avoid capture Thornhill draws attention to himself by bidding in the auction, but with a difference. When the bidding on one item reaches $2250 Thornhill counters with $1500 and when the auctioneer reprimands him then changes his bid and shouts out $1200!

The auction crowd, not used to such unruly behaviour, are clearly agitated and Thornhill gets what he was after when the auctioneer summons the police who escort him off the premises right past the waiting bad guys to safety!

A clever move and funny in the film as Thornhill breaks every psychological rule about how we negotiate price and value with each other. Unlike Thornhill most of us are looking for, and are motivated to find, a good deal when buying.

To do that we engage the brain in some fairly sophisticated cognitive decision making when looking at offers and prices but what does that mean to us as marketers when setting the price for our products?

An experiment run by Professors of Marketing looked at how people respond to price and whether the actual amount had an effect on what they saw as the products value. They wanted to know whether we really are fooled when business owners price goods at $97 instead of $100.

They asked three groups of test subjects to imagine that they were buying a high end Plasma TV from a retailer that had a reputation for pricing goods competitively and they were asked to estimate the trade cost of the TV.

Each group was given a different retail price as a starting point of $5000, $4988 and $5012 and when they were asked to estimate the trade price the group starting at $5000 guessed much lower than the other two groups.

Plus they also found that groups given a round number as their anchor number were also more likely to give their guess number in round figures. The experiment was run dozens and dozens of times and always with the same results.

Why would this happen? The scientists thought that people create ‘mental measuring sticks’ that run in increments away from the opening bid or initial price and the size of those increments depends on that initial price or bid. So, if we see a price at $100 we may think is it worth $95, $92 or $90 whereas mentally when we see $97 or $99.95 we think £99.50 or $95.50.

To try and correlate these findings in the ‘outside’ world the scientists looked at house prices and found that those houses with exact listings such as $495,450 took less time to sell than those that priced in round numbers like $500,000.

So, as marketers we may not understand the science or psychology behind it but in a buyers’ market we should be listing in exact figures such as $47.97 and not rounded up to $48.

As an experiment, have a trial run at pricing your products in this way and see what response it brings.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Psychology of Pricing For Success

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About 10 days ago, British mobile phone giant Vodafone announced it would stop carrying the HTC HD2 in favor of Apple’s finest. While Vodafone won’t have the iPhone out to their customers before Christmas, they have announced the pricing for the iPhone plans.

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Read the rest of Vodafone Announces Pricing, Plans For iPhone [Vodafone iPhone Plans Starting At £30]

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Giddi is a product rating engine that works by aggregating product details, pricing, reviews, sales and other important criteria from a number of web sources including Amazon, Shopping.com, Epinions, and CNET Reviews. This information is run through a proprietary calculation to generate the Giddi Rating. Giddi currently builds this rating for 609496 products from 1604873 reviews across 259 categories.

Giddi is determined to help you make better purchasing decisions by bringing greater transparency to the marketplace. We’re just getting started, so please bear with the imperfections.

http://www.giddi.com/

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Recently, AT&T has been vocally combating Verizon’s ad campaign by using semantics and Luke Wilson to paint their competitor’s 3G network as inferior. Now, Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, is taking on a new opponent: customers.

De la Vega has come out to candidly admit that wireless coverage in Manhattan and San Francisco is, as most customers already know, subpar (but, they’re working on it). However, while discussing efforts to improve the AT&T experience in those cities, de la Vega also insinuated that the carrier could start treating some customers differently, with different pricing plans that financially reward or penalize based on data usage.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that heavy smartphone users only represent about 3 percent of the customer base, but their mobile activities are accounting for 40 percent of data traffic. That imbalance is disconcerting to AT&T, and they’re going to do everything in their power — reportedly inline with net-neutrality and FCC regulations — to, as de la Vega says, “keep those subscribers from hampering the experience for everyone else.”

So what will AT&T do to curtail their users? Apparently de la Vega is considering offering these data hogs (i.e. me) incentives to alter their mobile consumption rates. The incentives sound more like a warning:

“Many customers don’t know how much bandwidth they’re consuming, Mr. de la Vega added. When AT&T conducted a broadband test, customers often reduced their data use. Longer-term, he said, a pricing scheme based on usage is likely, though it will be determined by industry competition and regulatory guidelines.”

Although the details are vague, we can’t imagine iPhone owners, who are the most likely culprits here, will be keen on de la Vega’s “incentives.”

[img credit: tdubose]

Tags: att, ralph de la vega

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"The whole world is going digital, and the future of how we communicate, how we get information, and even how we transact, is in the hands of developers," said PayPal President Scott Thompson. "The network is the platform on which the potential of digital money will be fully realized."

The company also demonstrated a mobile payment toolkit to embed payments directly into mobile applications, starting with the iPhone. That is going to open up a tremendous amount of opportunities.

PayPal introduced some new enhancements for its Adaptive Payments API, such as:

- Currency conversion
- Pay Anyone (customers won’t need a PayPal account)
- Pre-approvals (developers can create reusable payments agreements)

Developers can build person-to-person (P2P) solutions or business-to-business (B2B) payment applications on mobile phones or social networking sites. They can take a cut or distribute funds from PayPal payments as they happen. They can also enable buyers to send money to several people in one payment. This would come in handy for buyers who purchase multiple items from different sellers.

PayPal also announced that it has added five new currencies and now supports payments in a total of 24 currencies including the U.S. Dollar, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Taiwan New Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, Euro, Swiss Franc, Czech Koruna, Swedish Krona, Danish Krone, Norwegian Krone, Hungarian Forint, Mexican Peso, Philippine Peso, Malaysian Ringgit, Chinese RMB, Israeli New Shekel, Pounds Sterling, Brazilian Real, Polish Zloty, Thai Baht and Japanese Yen.

"The addition of these new currencies makes it even easier to use PayPal around the world," said Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president. "Consumers have more choice in how they pay, merchants can conduct business in more markets around the world, and developers can now create multi-currency applications built on PayPal X."

Next year, there will be new pricing for services payments. There will be a flat fee of 50 cents for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with a three-day settlement period, or a 0.75% fee for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with instant settlement.

A mobile payment software development kit will be unveiled sometime in the first half of 2010, and the developer portal is now available at X.com.

What do you think about PayPal X? About the new pricing? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Consumers Can Now Get Billed Later for eBay Purchases

> eBay’s Donahoe Prepared To Spin Off PayPal

> The Dawn of Real Facebook eCommerce

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Its powerful shipping settings inclusive of weight, price and destination based pricing, real-time quotes from FedEx, UPS etc. offer you the flexibility to provide your customers with customized pricing. Originally created by Harald Ponce de Leon, this software supports multilingual, multicurrency, offline payments along with support for shippable and downloadable products.

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One of the interesting trend which I noticed recently is to representing the pricing info in creative manner. Modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with our work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of new trends emerge.

In this showcase, you’ll find a variety of highly-creative, beautiful, unique, and most importantly inspirational designs which are following the same trend of creative pricing presentation. We don’t want you to follow any specific trend as the aim here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire your imagination to create your own design trend because your website represents you and your brand.

The more time and effort you dedicate for a usable, eye-catching design and hitting your objectives, the higher are your chances for getting better account balance in the end of the month.

You may be interested in the following design inspiration related articles as well.

• Corporate Website Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• Single Page Website Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part – II
• 70 Fresh and Inspirational Blog Designs
• 50+ Beautiful Website Designs Using Office Stationery
• 55 Sexy Our Work Page Designs
• 80+ Incredible Designs with Bird’s-eye View

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to design inspiration that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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Generally, the companies that have a healthy financial leg to stand on have focused on making the experience of giving them your money as clear and as enjoyable as possible. In fact, with the good ones, you are happy to give them your money.

Good service from beginning to end is a pleasure to pay for.

Design Is More Than Looks

Here are 15 of the applications that show good design behind the entire process — whether it’s creating your account, comparing their pricing plans or entering in your credit card information. In this case, fast and easy are the goals.

And both are achievable.

Of course, capturing the essence of each page is hard to do when squished into a smaller screenshot. Feel free to click on each thumbnail to view the full page itself. Or view the entire collection here on my Ember account.

CampaignMonitor

One of the great email campaign services available today, CampaignMonitor has done a great job ensuring that an often confusing process is easy for their customers to understand. Clear language is used right from the start.

When you are introducing users to your service, clarity is a necessity.

Vimeo

Vimeo is one of the more popular video sharing services around — for good reason. It’s a well designed application. And the signup page is no different.

No confusing payment options here. It’s either free or less than $10 per month. Perhaps some would complain of a lack of options, but I like to err on the side of simplicity. Vimeo is just that.

Ballpark

If you’ve been reading this space from the beginning, you’ll know I have a strong appreciation for Ballpark. The strong visual design is not impeded by poor functionality in any way.

And that is clear from the start when you look at the pricing plans available.

Upload Robots

A nice looking alternative to a service like Dropbox, Upload Robots is another service that focuses on simplicity and a ‘just works’ mentality. This is clear on their dead simple registration page — there are only four required fields to fill out and no frustrating Captcha’s.

And the Upgrade

And the next step is nice as well, should you choose to upgrade to a Pro account. Nothing complicated here. Just an aesthetically pleasing page and one big, impossible-to-miss ‘Upgrade Today’ button.

Raveal

The team at Flowz took a different approach with Raveal. When you navigate to the sign up page, you are given two choices: Professional or Company. Both choices will give you multiple options for that account type. I think it’s a good way to break up the options rather than trying to squeeze it all in one page.

Best of all, each group of options pops on the screen with some nice javascript magic rather than reloading a whole new page. Nicely done.

Squarespace

The do everything web service Squarespace has an interesting horizontal layout for their pricing and sign up pages. A good choice in this day of wide screen monitors.

SixCentral

Another clean example, SixCentral’s pricing page makes it easy for the end user to make a decision. You only have two options and each has a large, bright button to use.

Krop

The registration page at Krop is also well done. As you can see, there are also only two options here and the page is simply laid out.

Clicking on either option leads you to an equally simple page with minimal fields required.

Ember

Another app we’ve covered in this space, Ember has a good overall sign up page with only 3 fields required, an overview of the two account types and some FAQ type questions and answers on the side. It give’s the user everything they need with minimal action required.

YouVersion

A newer site that I’ve found, YouVersion is a sharp online Bible application. And its sign up page fits in with the others we’ve mentioned, with a clean design and minimal fields required to get started.

I love sites that enable you to sign up and get started, then allow you to fill in details later.

Tumblr

One of my favourite web applications, Tumblr is one of the easiest to start using. Three easy steps and you can start blogging.

Tumblr is the epitome of simplicity and user friendliness in my mind — and that is clear from the start.

Invoice Machine

The sign up page at The Invoice Machine is also nicely done. It has a few more fields to fill in, but I really appreciate the paragraphs in the side which lend clarity to exactly what you are signing on for. The text is large enough and well space — there’s nothing worse than being forced to read poorly written, cramped text online.

That is not the case here.

Less Accounting

With the guys who built LessAccounting, you quickly understand that for them, less is more. And that’s clear in the signup page for LessAccounting — there are minimal fields and a barebones page that takes up a fraction of the browser.

There’s nothing complicated here.

Action Method Online

Action Method is an approach to project management with resources that include a web app, iPhone app and paper tools. The web application, Action Method Online (AMO) has another good example of a clean sign up page.

There are a few more fields, but there is no clutter in the page at all.

Kontain

Similar to Squarespace, the unique sign up page at Kontain use a horizontal approach. And with only 4 fields required, the process couldn’t be easier.

In This Case, Size Matters

Again, be sure to visit each page for the full effect, or view my collection on Ember. Do you have some inspiring sign up or registration pages that you enjoy? Share with us in the comments.

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