If you have a social media account, then you ought to be familiar with this trend as you must’ve seen a few social media vendors, i.e people who advertise and sell their goods and services via their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp or some other social media platform account. If you haven’t, then let me explain, ‘DM for price’ is a pricing system on social media where vendors showcase their goods and services in public social media spaces for everyone to see but without the prices of said products and services attached, offering instead the phrase, “DM for Price” (Direct Message for price), meaning to message the vendors privately to learn the prices of the commodities they showcased publicly. it is the offline equivalent of a store owner only whispering the price to customers when they ask so no one else hears.

So why do social media vendors hide their prices?

• Price Protection: Every business has it’s competitors and sometimes you don’t want your competition to know what you’re doing, so these vendors might try to throw off their competitors by hiding their prices so that it can’t be stolen or so the competition can’t get information about their business. This reason however is slightly redundant, considering the anonymity social media grants its users, the competition could always use their personal accounts or even create new accounts to “DM for price” and get the information they need. A second, more logical reason is;
• To enable Price Discrimination: Price Discrimination, according to investopedia, is a selling strategy that charges customers different prices for the same product or service based on what the seller thinks they can get the customer to agree to. In pure price discrimination, the seller charges each customer the maximum price they’re willing to pay. We can safely assume that when a potential buyer DM’s for the price, like in a physical market, they rarely settle for the first price and will most likely negotiate and settle for a price that suites them both and also, this enables sellers to browse through the customer’s profile to “size them up” so they might charge what they think the seller can afford and not what the commodity is actually worth. Read more on price discrimination here.

Now having said all of this, there are also a lot of air tight, much simpler reasons to make prices public. First is

• Convenience: it simply makes transactions much easier. The Average customer would much rather see the goods with their prices and then decide if he wants them instead of having to send a private message and then having to wait for a response again and then probably having to hassle over the price. I mean what if someone looks at your page at 1am? they’d have to wait several hours to find out the price of something that might even be beyond their budget.
• Transparency and Trust: Customers want to do business with a vendor they trust and hiding your prices makes you look shady. Even if you’re sending the same price list to everyone, people will still rightfully suspect you’re only hiding prices so you can size them up and overcharge them or whatever other reason comes to their mind. As a business, this is bad.
• Competition: I can guarantee you that quite literally anybody will patronise a vendor with their prices on display before they even bother to DM one that hides prices, save for the sake of curiosity. The premise is simple, as long as the price is acceptable by them, it is the much simpler option.

I don’t believe asking people to DM for price makes vendors any supernormal profit, I believe it does alienate and strain customer relations though and that can’t be

These are my thoughts on the DM for price trend, I’ve tried but I fail to see the rationale behind it and so I fail to defend it but before I posted this, to understand both sides, I googled “a good reason to hide prices”, if you do too, you’ll find the debate is lob sided. Also, I’ve embedded some tweets below that shows the general approach to the trend, its hard to find a tweet defending it.

Imagine if a supermarket required you to go to the cashier everytime to check the price of product. Inconvenient right?

That's ”DM for Price”

— WoshDraws (@WoshDraws) July 12, 2019

“dm for prices” when advertising a product is the reason you’re not making enough sales, consumers want accessibility and swift information so they can make an informed decision.

— Joe Human (@joe_human_) April 25, 2019

You posted nice Tshirts and said we should DM for Price.

I did, and picked my favourite design.

You now called Tshirt wey be 5k – 7k normal level, for me 28k!

You are now asking me "Are you there?"

If it was you, will you be there?

You sef , reason am nah. 🙄

— Alex Oluwatobi (@alexlobaloba) July 31, 2020