Should you put prices on your fitted furniture website?

Yes, if what goes up is a guide price for the customer's own wall, shown as a range and marked subject to survey. That answers "roughly how much?" before you drive out to measure, and your rate per metre stays private. A price list is the version to avoid. It gets screenshotted, it's wrong for any job that isn't standard, and it hands your rates to the firm down the road.

Why do most fitters keep prices off their website?

For good reasons. Every job is different. A 2.4 m alcove in a Victorian terrace with walls out of true is a different job from the same width in a new build, and one figure on a web page can't know which one it's pricing. A fixed price gets quoted back at you. And nobody wants a competitor reading their rates and pitching a bit under.

There's a quieter reason too. Your pricing took years to get right. Putting it on a page for anyone to read feels like giving it away.

What does keeping them off cost you?

The survey that goes nowhere. Forty minutes each way, an hour measuring up and talking through options, an evening drawing it and pricing it. Then the reply: they were thinking more like eight hundred quid.

Those customers weren't wasting your time on purpose. Nobody had told them what fitted furniture costs, so they guessed, and they guessed flat-pack.

I won't give you a figure for how often that happens, because I don't have one I trust. You'll know your own. Count last month's surveys that died on price alone, and add up the hours, including the drive and the evening at the table.

Does showing a price put customers off?

Some of them. The people a realistic price puts off are the people whose budget didn't stretch to it, and you'd have found that out at the survey anyway. The difference is when you find out. On your website, it costs you nothing. In their front room, it costs you an afternoon and an evening.

The ones who still get in touch have seen a number and enquired anyway. The first conversation can be about the job.

What should you actually show?

A price for the customer's own job, worked out from your rates and shown as a range. Here's an example. On GuidePrice's example rates, a 2.4 m wide set of hinged fitted wardrobes in MFC comes out at £2,050 – £2,550, fitted, subject to survey. Those are example rates, not any firm's prices.

The customer puts in their width, finish and extras and sees a range for that. They never see the rate per metre behind it. A competitor could sit there trying widths one at a time, but they'd learn less than they would from one of your quotes left on a customer's kitchen table.

If you try it, a few things keep it honest:

• Always a range, or a "from" figure if you prefer. Never one number.
• "Subject to survey" right next to the price, in the words you'd use on the phone.
• Wide enough to be true. If your phone ballparks run wide, so should this.
• Built from your own rates, so it moves when they do.

To see what a homeowner sees, try the fitted wardrobe cost calculator. It runs on the same example rates.

Will customers hold you to a guide price?

That's the next worry, and it's fair. I'm not a solicitor, so this isn't legal advice on what a customer can hold you to. What you can control is what they were shown: a range, the survey line in the same box as the price, and the same wording in writing afterwards. If the survey finds a sloping ceiling and a wall that's 20 mm out, there's a record that the number was always a guide.

What if you don't want the price on show to everyone?

Ask for details first. The price can stay hidden until the customer has left a name, email and postcode. You see who looked, and the enquiry arrives with the wall width and finish already on it.

So should you?

If most of the jobs you lose are lost on price after you've surveyed, a guide price range is worth trying. If your diary is full of people who already know what you charge, from word of mouth or a showroom, you may not need one. Whichever way you go, skip the price list.