Probably not — and the tidiest evidence is that most of the internet already doesn't.
When researchers scraped 9,200 product prices across 23 countries, round prices like $40.00 were the single most common format at 51.7%. Just-below prices — your $39.99 — accounted for just 25.3%, with precise prices like $38.47 making up the remaining 23.0% (Ventura et al., Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 2025 (opens in new tab)). The .99 ending is not the default. It only feels like the default because it clusters in the aisles you walk most often: grocery, fast fashion, big-box.
That is the actual answer to the question. The nine-ending is not a universal trick for extracting more money from a shopper. It is a category signal — and it says something quite specific that most handmade sellers spend their whole listing trying not to say.
The .99 effect is real. It just says "this one is the cheap one."
Credit where it is due: the effect is not folklore. Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester ran three field experiments with a real retailer, manipulating price endings on live merchandise, and published the results in Quantitative Marketing and Economics. Their headline finding was clean — "use of a $9 price ending increased demand in all three experiments" (Anderson & Simester, 2003 (opens in new tab)).
But the two conditions they attached to it are the whole story for a maker:
- It worked hardest on new items. The lift "was stronger for new items than for items that the retailer had sold in previous years."
- It faded when the shop already shouted about discounts. There was "some evidence that $9 price endings are less effective when retailers use 'Sale' cues."
The authors' own reading of why: nine-endings "may be more effective when customers have limited information."
The ending, in other words, is doing informational work. It is a shortcut whispering this one is priced to be a bargain to a shopper with no other way to judge whether the item is worth it — a genuinely useful signal on a rack of forty near-identical blouses.
Now think about what you are trying to communicate on a hand-thrown mug, a small-batch hot sauce, or a made-to-order walnut board. You want the buyer to stop pattern-matching against a rack: to look at the glaze, read the story, register that a person made this one. A .99 ending is a small, cheerful signal pointing back toward the aisle you deliberately left.
The uncomfortable version: the nine-ending does its best work precisely where a product's advantages are invisible. If it is working hard for you, that is worth investigating.
The "round numbers feel premium" rule is shakier than it sounds
Here is where handmade pricing advice usually takes a wrong turn, because you have probably been handed the conclusion without the caveat.
The counter-advice — use round numbers, they feel more emotional and premium — traces back to a well-known 2015 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. Monica Wadhwa and Kuangjie Zhang proposed that rounded prices are processed more fluently and encourage feeling-based decisions, while non-rounded prices encourage analytical ones. Across five studies they reported that rounded prices "lead to a subjective experience of 'feeling right'" when a purchase is driven by feelings (Wadhwa & Zhang, 2015 (opens in new tab)). For anyone selling handmade goods that is a flattering result: your buyers are buying on feeling, so hand them a round number.
Then somebody checked.
In 2018, Harms, Genau, Meschede and Beauducel published a direct replication attempt in Royal Society Open Science with 588 participants — nearly twice the original study's 318. It failed to reproduce the effect. On the original product, neither the link between price roundedness and the type of purchase nor the "feeling right" mechanism held up. Their conclusion was measured but plain: the effect "is either smaller than originally reported or contingent on other, not investigated factors" (Harms et al., 2018 (opens in new tab)).
So the honest state of play is this. The evidence that .99 lifts sales is field-tested but narrow. The evidence that round prices feel more premium is contested and did not replicate cleanly. Anyone selling you a confident rule in either direction is running ahead of the data.
What to actually do
Pick a convention, apply it consistently, and go spend the energy somewhere it pays.
- Default to round or near-round prices. $38, $40, $45. Not because a study proved they feel luxurious, but because round is the most common format online, it is easier to say across a market stall, and it makes your arithmetic at wholesale and discount time far less painful.
- Reserve nine-endings for the moments they were built for. Clearance, seconds, sale racks, the discontinued colorway. Used there, the signal and the situation finally agree.
- Never mix endings inside one collection. A shelf reading $32, $34.99, $36 looks like three pricing decisions made on three different days, because that is exactly what it is.
- Only run a test if you have the traffic to read one. Telling a small conversion difference from ordinary week-to-week noise takes far more orders per variant than most handmade shops see in a month. If that sounds like your shop, skip the test and use the defaults above.
And keep the stakes in proportion. The last digit is worth a sliver of a percent in the narrow conditions where it works at all. The digits to its left are where the money is, and those come from knowing your true cost per unit — materials at what you really paid, labor at a rate you would accept from a stranger, packaging, platform fees. That is the number worth an afternoon, whether you work it out in a spreadsheet or in dedicated inventory and costing software. More often than not, the pricing problem was never the cents. It was an ingredient still priced from a receipt three suppliers ago.
Fix that first. Then, if you like, argue about the nine.
Start tracking your real cost per unit — free
Related reading
- Margin vs Markup — the confusion that quietly turns a "50% margin" into a 33% one, which will cost you far more than any price ending ever will.
- Pricing Audit Before Raising Prices — the check to run on your cost basis before you touch a single price tag.
- Against "Just Charge More" — why the most repeated piece of handmade pricing advice skips the part that determines whether a raise actually sticks.
Free resources
If you would rather settle the numbers to the left of the decimal point:
- Product Pricing Calculator — an Excel workbook that takes materials, labor, packaging and platform fees and returns a retail price clearing your target margin after fees, so the number you round is a defensible one to begin with.
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, or business advice. Cost structures, pricing examples, and margin figures are illustrative and will vary by your specific circumstances. Consult a qualified accountant or small-business advisor before making financial decisions based on this content.