My client was cheaper than every competitor and still losing sales. The problem wasn't price.
I do freelance dev work and recently built a Chrome extension for a car parts retailer. This client genuinely beats their bigger competitors on price, especially for bulk B2B buyers (workshops, resellers). But those buyers were already comfortable ordering on a competitor's site out of habit. The price advantage existed. It just wasn't visible at the moment they were actually buying. So they kept overpaying elsewhere without knowing it. The brief was simple: show our customers, while they're shopping on a competitor's site, that the same parts cost less with us. The client's first instinct was to inject their prices right onto the competitor's product pages so it looked native. I pushed back hard, and this turned out to be the most important call of the project. Anything you put on a page someone else controls, they can detect, break, and remove. It's their turf. So instead I put the comparison in a browser sidebar. The browser renders it, the website can...