An espresso machine on Frávega's website in Buenos Aires had no price listed. A shopper added it to her cart, saw a number lower than she feared, and bought. That scene, tracked across thousands of sales in a 2025 Journal of Consumer Research study, puts a crack in one of the most repeated rules in pricing.

"Reduce friction to increase sales." You have heard it. It sounds right. It is not wrong. It is incomplete at the level of mechanism.

The research on this is worth reading. Felipe Affonso, Amin Shiri, and Diego Aparicio led a team that ran two large field tests and a set of lab studies. They published the results under the title "Concealing Prices."

Frávega is a major Argentine retailer of household appliances and technology, similar to a Best Buy in the United States. During a stretch when inflation topped 40 percent, the company hid prices on some of its online listings. Shoppers, braced for the worst, imagined a high number. When the real price appeared below that guess, it felt like relief. They bought.

The data are clean. Shoppers were 21.1% more likely to buy an expensive espresso machine when the price showed up after the cart click than when it was listed on the page.

Xu said it in one line: "We found that delayed disclosure of prices amplified the influence of price beliefs people had."

The delay did not plant a new thought. It turned up the volume on the one already there.

Now run the same test on sale items. When shoppers expected a deal, hiding the price let their minds drift to a number even lower than the real one. The reveal felt like a letdown, not a relief.

The drop: 18.1% less interest in a 30%-off espresso machine when the sale price came after a click. Daily deal emails with hidden prices saw an 11.4% drop. Same product type. Same delay. Opposite outcome.

One mechanism, two results. The direction depends on where the buyer's head starts.

"Reduce friction" treats price display as a neutral design choice. Show it or hide it. A toggle with no cost.

The problem is not the advice. The problem is that "reduce friction" replaces a harder question: where does your brand sit on the buyer's mental price line? Hiding your price is not a neutral toggle. It is a bet on which way the buyer's guess will run. Most operators do not know which side of that bet they sit on.

Before you touch friction on your checkout or your sales page, audit your price position. Once that is clear, three moves follow.

Ask five past buyers what they expected to pay before they saw your number. Not what they thought it was worth. What they expected. If their guess runs higher than your real price, you sit below the line. If it runs lower, you sit above it. This takes one email and ten minutes, and most operators have never sent it.

If you are the premium option and your price tends to land lower than the buyer fears, a delayed reveal works for you. The gap between their guess and your real number does the selling. If you are the deal, the sale, the low-cost play, show the number right away. Do not let the buyer's mind drift to a figure you cannot beat.

The study found this too. When a retailer told shoppers why the price was hidden, citing a policy like "minimum advertised price," most shoppers guessed the number must be low. That guess cut their interest in buying, even for premium items that would have gained from the delay. The moment you name the reason, you hand the buyer a frame. It almost always points down.

Running this audit over a few weeks does something the advice never did:

You see which offers sit above the buyer's guess and which sit below. You see where a hidden price earns you money and where it costs you. You see the gap between what you think your brand signals and what the buyer fills in when the number is gone. You stop treating every point of friction as a bug to fix.

At the end of a quarter, ask three things.

→ Which pages moved the number after the display change?
→ Which ones looked like they should have worked but left no trace?
→ Where did the same drop-off show up more than once?

That is the difference between advice that sounds right and a system that proves itself.

The Frávega shopper was never missing a price. A number was running in her head the whole time. The delay just gave it room. When the real figure came in low, she felt relief. When it came in high, she left.

Your buyer is doing the same thing on your page right now. The only question is which version of the number you are betting on.