Free Van Westendorp Willingness To Pay template

The Willingness to Pay framework has been developed by Van Westendorp and has been introduced in 1976. It is probably used more frequently nowadays than ever before, so the model seems to have withstood the test of time. With this template I have tried to strike a balance where the spreadsheet covers some edge cases but is still fairly easy to use without prior knowledge of the Van Westendorp pricing model.

At Kasva, I ran a number of willingness to pay surveys. Each time I ran such a survey, I built on experience from past ones in order to jump start the analysis. As a result, I built this template that I use myself as a baseline when starting a new willingness to pay analysis. Using this template saves time that would otherwise be spent on building spreadsheets.

‍

When to use the template

In order to run a Van Westendorp willingness to pay analysis, you first need to create and conduct a survey that contains some screening questions (to make sure that your survey respondents are potential future customers), some general information about your product, and the four main survey questions to understand the optimal price points. Once you have run this survey (at least 1,500 respondents are suggested), you can enter the data in this spreadsheet and analyze the results to understand the optimal price points for your product. At Kasva, I am consulting clients on product & growth, so this framework is part of my tool box when working with clients on monetization.

One of the challenges we encountered when running a Van Westendorp survey were incorrect responses during the survey. Survey respondents would for instance reply that the product would be too expensive at $5 and that it would start getting expensive at $8, which makes no sense. Within this template, I have included a number of sanity checks that identify and (optionally) remove such responses from the results.

The output of the analysis is a suggested price range. In order to analyze the effectiveness of the model, I change my product's prices in accordance with the results from the survey. In a next step, I measure the effectiveness of the model by analyzing the conversion rates and new user revenue. This can be run as A/B test with variant A using old prices and variant B using new prices suggested by the model. For evaluating the impact, you can use my Reforge artifact "Business impact calculation of pricing experiments".

‍

Overview of the template

The spreadsheet has two main tabs:

1. Survey Data: this is where you enter the responses of your survey. Essentially, you have to provide the $-values your survey respondents provide for each of the four Van Westendorp questions. There are also three validations that are used in the "-pvt" table that helps you dismiss invalid responses.
2. Results: provides an overview of the results of the Van Westendorp willingness to pay analysis. It includes charts that indicate you with the optimum price range, the percentage of sales lost at different price points, and a potential revenue forecast. Optionally, there are detailed tabs that include results across all areas (countries/states) that you may have surveyed.

‍

Download free template

You can download the free template here.

If you need any support working on the model, feel free to reach out.