Bill Brown identifies two major pricing mistakes contractors make online: treating price lists as standalone sales channels and failing to integrate estimate tools across marketing. He's launching a conversational commerce tool in late March that uses AI to help contractors engage customers and AI agents where they browse.
Chapters
What, what mistakes have you seen contractors make when they've added pricing to their website, when they've tried the online pricing system? So the first mistake was thinking that, hey, if I put something on my website, my customers are going to buy it from me. And better case scenario, new customers will buy it from me. We found that not to be true. Consumers are not conditioned to purchase online from a contractor. At least they weren't at that point. Now, there were a lot of contractors who had a ton of success driving traffic there and running campaigns and doing that. But Mistake 1 is not taking an active role in e-commerce across the business, just expecting, you know, whether it's having an online store or signing up for Contractor Commerce, whatever it is, just expecting that to be kind of an isolated decision and then things happen. And that's actually, that mistake is what led us. So that was kind of phase 1 Contractor Commerce. What our customers pushed us for was they wanted to immediately skip the services and skip those sort of things and start selling the bigger ticket items. And so that next phase of learning was kind of what we're in now, which is like the guided experience, letting a customer be in a controlled environment, go through and get an estimate on a water heater or get an estimate on a generator or an EV charger, or that's kind of led us to the— well, and the mistake made in that era again is not incorporating that capability across your marketing. The auto industry, there's so much to learn from the auto industry. I know we were joking before this call about Maybe it was on the call about, you know, the, the car in the showroom, but there's so much to learn because the auto industry was at kind of a crossroads in 2010, 11 about putting pricing online. And the idea was that if you put your pricing online, it will be a race to the bottom. And this dealership is going to see the price. And we all know that that never happened, right? That never happened. So this next phase of e-commerce for contractors was when we, when we first started the company, one of the things that we would say is, you know, there's Hey, we know we're going to be successful with this because online shopping is not going to change. So we knew we were making a sure bet. And the thing we couldn't account for is like we spent so much time and energy teaching a human how to go to Travis Crawford's website, answer a few questions and get a quote. And while all that was happening and while all that has been wildly successful, people started going to AI agents and now AI agents started crawling websites to get information. So our release at the end of March, is the next phase, which is the conversational commerce. And that is Jeff is going to have, and he'll be the first one to have it, but he'll, he will have an unbelievably powerful tool on his website that takes all of the things he's been building for, for the last couple of years with just being first and putting pricing online, takes it to another level and meets the consumer again where they are because the consumer moved.
