Raise, hold, or discount? What sellers are actually doing right now

Costs are creeping up almost everywhere, competitors seem to be repricing, and it’s tempting to just move your prices to match. There’s no rule to borrow from someone else’s numbers, though — it comes down to what your own margins and your own customers are actually telling you, sitting in a dashboard you probably don’t check often enough.

What’s actually happening out there

The pressure isn’t imagined. In NFIB’s June 2026 Small Business Economic Trends survey, 38% of small business owners reported raising average selling prices that month — the highest share since January 2023 and the fourth month in a row that figure climbed. NFIB’s own release also noted inflation had climbed back to the single most-cited business problem, named by 21% of owners — up 3 points in a month, a level last seen in October 2024. Whatever’s happening in your own numbers, it’s not happening in isolation.

But almost nobody is just flipping a switch

The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 Small Business Credit Survey cuts against that instinct. Fielded last fall across 6,500 firms nationally, it found that roughly 80% of goods and retail firms passed on at least some of their higher costs to customers, while about 60% of those same firms also absorbed part of the increase themselves. The New York Fed’s analysis is blunt about what that means: over a third of goods firms and over 40% of retail firms did both at once, raising some prices while eating some of the cost elsewhere. Raise, hold, or discount isn’t really a three-way fork most sellers are choosing between. It’s a dial most of them are nudging listing by listing, not flipping all at once.

A framework that beats a gut feeling

Before touching a price, it’s worth answering three questions about that specific product, not your shop in general.

• Is a cost genuinely eating this product’s margin, or is this “everyone else is doing it” anxiety? A material or shipping cost that rose is a different situation than a headline making you nervous. Pull the number that matters before you touch the price: what the product keeps after your costs, not what it sold for.
• Would your customers still buy at a higher price? Check conversion rate on that specific listing over the last several weeks instead of guessing. Steady views with steady orders means there’s some room. Views already outpacing orders means demand is softer than it looks, and raising the price there usually just shrinks the funnel further.
• Where do you sit against comparable listings? Priced well below similar products, a modest raise usually goes unnoticed. Already at the top of your category, that same raise reads differently to a shopper who’s comparison-shopping.

Line those three answers up and the decision mostly makes itself. Real cost pressure, steady demand, and room below comparable listings point toward raising. Without the demand to back it up, the same cost pressure points toward holding the price and finding the savings somewhere else on the product instead. Discounting is the option that deserves the most suspicion of the three.

Why discounting is usually the wrong reflex

Discounting feels like the safe, customer-friendly move when things feel uncertain, but it rarely fixes what it’s aimed at. If a listing is slow because the wrong audience is finding it, a lower price just makes the same problem less profitable while it persists. And a discount is sticky in a way a lot of sellers underestimate: once buyers have seen a lower price, going back up reads as a price increase even when you’re only returning to where you started. The second move is always harder than the first.

The five-minute version

Pull your top three sellers for the month. For each one, check two things: what it keeps after real costs, the number underneath the revenue line covered in revenue vs. profit, and whether its conversion rate has held steady or softened over the past month. Cross those two answers and you’ll know, product by product, which ones can absorb a raise, which ones need the cost problem solved somewhere other than the price, and which ones to leave alone entirely. No spreadsheet required. It runs the same shape of check as the Monday review, just pointed at pricing instead of the usual questions.

The honest limit

None of this replaces watching what actually happens after you move a price. A raise that looks safe on paper can still cost you orders you didn’t expect to lose, and the only way to know is to check conversion again a couple of weeks later — not assume the framework got it right and move on.

That follow-up check is the part that quietly stops happening once you’re watching more than one listing across more than one platform. It’s a big part of why I built Welra: a weekly report that already has your real margin and your conversion trend sitting next to each other, so the question isn’t “did I imagine that price change working” — it’s right there in Monday’s numbers. The first report is free, or take a look at a sample report first.