When to raise your prices

"I know I should be charging more. I just don't know when, and I don't know what to say to the people already buying."

Raise your price when any one of five things is true: you have a waiting list, you're turning work away, your input costs have moved more than about 10% since you last looked, nobody ever hesitates at the number, or you're the cheapest in your market and that wasn't a decision you made on purpose. Then pick a date three weeks out, honour every quote you've already given, and tell your regulars once, in two sentences, without apologising for it.

The rest of this article is the arithmetic, the timing, and the awkward parts nobody warns you about.

The five signals

You have a waiting list, or a backlog you can't clear. This is the loudest signal there is. If people are waiting two weeks for something you make, demand is above supply and the price is the thing that's meant to balance them. A backlog is not a compliment. It's an unpaid invoice.

You're saying no to work. Turning down a commission because you haven't got the hours means the hours are worth more than you're charging for them. Raise the price until you're saying yes again, or until saying no stops costing you anything.

Your costs moved. Not "everything's gone up a bit". Go and check three actual numbers: what you paid for your main material this month, what postage costs today, and what your packaging costs per parcel. If any of them is more than 10% above what you assumed when you set the price, your margin has already fallen and you're just finding out late.

Nobody hesitates. If not one person in a hundred has ever asked whether there's a cheaper option, or paused, or gone quiet before buying, you are below the market. A small amount of friction at the point of purchase is what a correctly priced product feels like.

You're the cheapest and you didn't choose to be. Look at four sellers doing roughly what you do, in the market you actually sell in. If you're at the bottom and you didn't put yourself there deliberately, you drifted there, usually by setting a price in your first month and never touching it again.

Any one of those is enough. Two of them and you're overdue.

The signals that look like signals but aren't

A bad month is not a reason to raise prices. Neither is a good one.

Feeling underappreciated is not a reason either, although it's the most common one and it produces the worst decisions, because a price set out of resentment usually goes up too far, gets announced badly, and comes back down within a season.

Somebody else's price is the weakest reason on this list. You don't know their material costs, their volume, their rent, or whether they're profitable. Half the shops you're comparing yourself to are losing money and don't know it yet.

The one genuinely wrong time to raise a price is mid-way through a promise. If you've announced a launch, taken pre-orders, or told a customer a number for a custom job, that number is fixed until it's delivered. Everything else is negotiable. That isn't.

How much volume a price rise can cost you

This is the calculation that stops the fear, and it takes about ninety seconds.

Take your price and your unit cost. The gap between them is your profit per unit. After a rise, work out the new gap. Divide the old gap by the new gap and you get the fraction of your old volume you need to hold in order to make the same money.

A stoneware mug sells for $28 and costs $17 to make, including a real hourly rate for the maker's time.

Rise	New price	Profit per mug	Sales needed to stand still	Volume you can afford to lose
5%	$29.40	$12.40	89%	11%
10%	$30.80	$13.80	80%	20%
15%	$32.20	$15.20	72%	28%
20%	$33.60	$16.60	66%	34%

A 20% rise can lose you a third of your customers and leave you exactly where you were, working two thirds as hard. That's the number people don't have in their head when they agonise for six months over whether to add three dollars.

Now the part that surprises everyone. Run the same table on a thin margin. Same $28 mug, but the unit cost is $23, so profit is $5.

A 10% rise takes the price to $30.80 and the profit to $7.80. You need 64% of your old volume to stand still. You can lose 36% of your customers and be no worse off.

The thinner your margin, the more a price rise is worth and the more customers you can afford to lose doing it. The sellers who most need to raise prices are the ones most convinced they can't.

If you've never worked out your true unit cost, that's the job to do before this one, and it isn't materials times two. How to price what you make has the seven cost lines and the two most people skip.

Raise on a date, not in a mood

Pick a date. Say it out loud. Three weeks is about right: long enough that regulars can order at the old price if they want to, short enough that you don't spend two months talking about it.

Then do the boring preparation in that window:

1. Write down every outstanding quote you've given, and the price you quoted. Honour all of them.
2. Decide what happens to anyone with an unpaid order sitting in your messages. Old price, always. It's cheaper than the argument.
3. Update the price everywhere at once. Your shop page, your highlights, the price list you send in DMs, the sheet you take to markets, the pinned post.
4. Update the photograph or the description of at least one thing, so the listing has visibly changed.

Every quote you've sent out is a price promise with no expiry date on it, and the day you raise prices is the day you find out how many are still floating around in strangers' inboxes. Start putting a validity line on quotes now: "this price holds for 14 days" costs you nothing and saves the conversation entirely.

What to tell existing customers

Two sentences. Not a paragraph, not an explanation of your supplier costs, and no apology.

From 1 September, mugs are $34. Anything ordered before then is at $28, and any quote I've already given you still stands.

That's the whole message. Post it once, send it once to anyone who's bought more than twice, and then stop mentioning it.

What not to do:

• Don't justify it with a cost breakdown. It invites a negotiation about your costs, which is not a negotiation you can win.
• Don't say "unfortunately". You've done nothing wrong.
• Don't promise it won't happen again. It will.
• Don't announce it three times. Repeating it makes it sound like you're not sure.

The customers who complain loudest about a new price almost never stop buying. The ones who do stop don't say anything at all, and you notice six weeks later when a name you'd got used to seeing isn't in the orders. That asymmetry is why the noise you get in the first week tells you nothing about whether the rise worked.

Change something the buyer can see

A higher price on an identical listing feels like a tax. A higher price on a listing that changed feels like a decision.

You don't need a new product. You need the listing to have visibly moved: a better main photograph, a description that answers the sizing question people keep asking, a proper scale shot, a tidier background. Any of these takes an afternoon and does more for the price than the price does.

This is why the order of operations matters. Reshoot first, reprice second. A tired photo with a new number on it is the hardest sale in this article, and the fix costs a sheet of card and one window: how to photograph what you sell is the two-hour version.

Worked example: mugs in Portland, $28 to $34

Dana throws stoneware mugs in a shared studio in Portland, Oregon. She sells about 60 a month, mostly through Instagram and one weekend market, at $28 each.

Her unit cost, worked out properly, is $17. Clay and glaze $4.10, kiln share and studio rent divided by output $3.40, her own time at 35 minutes a mug on a rate she'd actually accept $6.50, packaging and the box $1.80, and a 1-in-14 loss rate on cracks and glaze faults about $1.20.

So she makes $11 a mug, $660 a month, for what is comfortably 40 hours of work. That's the number that made her do something.

She went to $34, a 21% rise, on the first of the month, with three weeks' notice.

	Before	After
Price	$28	$34
Unit cost	$17	$17
Profit per mug	$11	$17
Mugs needed to hold $660	60	39
Mugs she actually sold	60	54
Monthly profit	$660	$918

She lost six customers a month and gained $258. Two of the six came back in November.

The other thing she did, which mattered more than the price, was reshoot the whole range against a mid-grey board instead of her kitchen counter and add one photo of a mug next to a standard coffee filter for scale. Three of her regulars mentioned the photos. Nobody mentioned the price.

Raising prices when the currency moves

If your materials are imported and your currency isn't, the five signals above are almost irrelevant, because the only signal that matters is the exchange rate and it fires monthly.

Chinelo makes scented candles in Lagos and sells them at ₦6,500. Her wax, her fragrance oils and her tins are all priced in dollars by the time they reach her, and her jar supplier reprices without warning. When she set ₦6,500 the wax was one number. Four months later it was 18% higher and her margin had quietly gone from healthy to thin without a single decision being made.

What works in that situation is a schedule rather than a signal:

• Reprice on a fixed day every quarter, whether or not anything looks urgent.
• Recalculate the cost of your top three inputs the week before, from actual receipts, not memory.
• Put a validity window on every quote. Seven days is normal and nobody argues.
• Hold a small buffer in the price, so a 5% move doesn't force a reprice that month.

Customers in a market where prices move expect prices to move. The thing they don't forgive is a number changing between the quote and the invoice. Selling in a currency that moves goes further into holding a price you can actually honour.

Raise the price or cut the discount

Sometimes the rise you need has already happened and you're giving it away at the other end.

If you're running a standing 15% code, offering free delivery on everything, or knocking money off for anyone who asks, your list price is fiction. Removing a discount is a price rise that nobody announces and almost nobody notices, and on a normal handmade margin it's worth more than the equivalent rise in the sticker price, because a discount comes straight off the profit rather than off the top line.

Work out what your average sale actually is once discounts land. If your $28 mug goes out at an average of $25.60, the honest starting point for this whole exercise is $25.60. How to run a discount without losing money has the version of that arithmetic that most shops find uncomfortable.

What actually happens in the first month

Orders dip for two or three weeks. This is normal and it isn't the result.

The dip is partly people who bought at the old price the week before, which pulled demand forward, and partly the ordinary noise of a small shop where twelve orders and eighteen orders are the same month statistically. Judge a price rise after 60 days, not after nine days of anxiety.

What tends to change alongside it, and catches people out in a good way: the buyers you get at the higher price ask fewer questions, haggle less, and complain less. Cheap attracts a customer who is shopping on price and will leave on price. You are not losing your best customers when you raise a price. You are losing your most expensive ones.

If keeping the people you already have is the real worry, that's a different job from pricing, and it's mostly about the second order rather than the first: how to get repeat buyers covers what to do in the fortnight after a parcel arrives.

The honest limitation

You're going to base this decision on your own sales history, and on Sailo that history is shorter than you'd like on the free plan. 7 days of analytics is barely enough to notice a good week, let alone compare this September with last September, which is exactly the comparison a price decision wants. Pro is $19 a month for a year of history, Business is $49 for three years. If you're on free and thinking about a rise, write your monthly totals down somewhere yourself, because a week later the detail is gone.

The second thing to be straight about: on bank transfer, cash on delivery or an order handed to WhatsApp, Sailo never touches the money and can't tell you a payment arrived. Only your bank can. An order is marked paid because you marked it. If you're casual about that, the revenue figures underneath your price decision are a guess wearing a chart.

What to do next

Open your bank statement and find what you actually paid for your main material in the last month. Compare it with the number you had in your head when you set the price. That single comparison decides whether this is a maintenance rise or an overdue one.

Then pick a date. Put it in your calendar three weeks out, write the two-sentence message today while you're not nervous about it, and schedule the afternoon before it to reshoot your best seller.

If the number you land on feels slightly too high, it's probably right. The price that feels comfortable is the one you already have, and it's the one that got you here.