How to price my services for a potential client?

Question
1

I’m a tech savvy person. I can do a little bit of everything.

There’s a little business in town that is looking to keep a website going. Their current one is, sorry, pretty terrible.

Word of mouth came to me and I’d like to introduce myself and work on it with Sparkle and an e-commerce platform. But what do I fairly charge for these services in the United States?

  1. Design mockups and introduction.
  2. Final design and development.
  3. Upkeep and management.
2

There is no magic number , all depends on you business, competition in your areas, your expenses and so on.
Have a look in the internet what other companies or freelancer charge their clients
I figure it out that I cannot quote by hours, it would make it too expensive, I quote by project and additional services I might offer a hourly rate.
I did in the beginning a big discount because I wanted to have a portfolio, but don’t go too cheap in.
I hope that helps

3

really depends on what you’re willing to sell them - it’s just technical problem solving?

A website and an e-commerce must have an strategy behind it, cause if not, you won’t solve anything.

It’s a good opportunity to aggregate more, and even learn more for yourself. I’d change a few of your steps:

  1. Discovery session - what is the purpose of their e-commerce: is their actual strategy working? how can they improve their other strategies with the platform of choosing. Whats their actual platform (WooCommerce, Ecwid, Shopify, etc) ? What are their categories and where are they planning to expand (social media integration, marketplaces, etc)

  2. Prototype - here you’ll start assembling as a mockup for what you’ve talked with them at the previous step. A lot of collaboration here.

  3. You’re willing to be their webmaster or their ecommerce manager? Since they’ll need someone to handle and manage it, they probably won’t have the need for someone outside of the company doing this. Important note: a webmaster and an ecommerce manager are two different people - normally the IT and the marketing/sales team, respectively.

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4

All great advice. I will take this into account. For now, they have no e-commerce platform. But they do have a desire to sell antiques online. It is an antiques business. I have no idea what their current platform is. I will definitely be willing to pursue a webmaster and e-commerce manager position. I believe I can fulfill both duties. This is just a really tiny business so I don’t believe they have a need for two respective positions to get decent results.

I also floated the idea of selling them a static website and implementing an Ecwid store inside of it. That’s a more hands off approach since they can just handle one end of it and leave the static website as it is, with little updates as they see fit in terms of upkeep, which would be on my end.

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5

nice, then in this case you could offer them the structure for a fixed amount and your service as a e-commerce manager as a % fee or something like that, but it’s really up to you and the actual capacity of the business, but you would have to sell it to them as an investment and something that can bring up results in a good pace and structured way.

Ecwid is a good option for stuff made in Sparkle - that’s what I use the most and it works.

Hope you land this! Get back to us with news :slight_smile:

6

In addition, the one thing not really mention, which is crucial. Design. No matter how much tech savvy you put into it, if the site is not talking to the target demographic, then it will never work. People often think this is a DIY add-on. It’s not. I’d suggest finding a good designer and collaborating on it.

7

@zenith22, All very good questions but in the end the answers are always unique and never a standard of one size fits all…

  • From my end I would have a meeting and find out who I’m dealing with and by that one meeting you will know if you are a fit and if they are looking for what you have to offer. If price comes up I usually say well you are looking at a starting price of ??? but that will all be made clear in my proposal.
  • I would then send them out a questionnaire which becomes the foundation of the proposal and costing I would forward onto them.
  • And I make sure I have a contract attached so my client and I are on the same page.

But before all that I have nutted out my procedure(s) in what I’m offering and roughly how much time I would spend on it. All in all that would give me a rough figure that I would need to cover when offering a fixed price. The coming to the “price” would factor in your experience, your knowledge and expertise, what you know you can do for them so they make traction with customers, etc, etc…

Knowing that it will be antiques for sale even that needs to be considered in how the photoshoots come together reflecting the business’s branding and the consistent tone of the images and placement. If a client wants to do that I give them guidelines so to at least keep things close to consistent.

I have a few clients where I’m looking after their static Sparkle website (updates and SEO + marketing suggestions or implementations / month), with them looking after the Ecwid shop with of course my suggested guidelines. I have an example here - www.shopfronttrevallyn.com

So I hope that helps and good luck with it all :)…