What to charge?

chamlis

I've been asked to set up an osCommerce website for a shop. Some mild customisation will be involved, nothing too massive.

But what do I charge? It's osCommerce, so it's open source, but I AM doing work on it (little as it is). What can I realistically get away with charging for this?

There wil be hosting and domain purchasing also, but it's MY time and work I need to figure out the price for. I don't want to sell myself short, but I don't want to charge a ridiculous sum for relatively little work either, where they can go to someone else and I'll lose the deal :rolleyes:

I have no experience of charging for webwork as you can imagine, so any advice is appreciated.

Thanks all.

Seth Brundle

Whats your time worth?

chamlis

That's what I want to figure out I guess

Goodshape

kbannon wrote: »

Whats your time worth?

That's an obvious and annoying answer (which you always get when asking this sort of question). It falls down pretty fast when you consider, for instance, that a doctors time on the job is probably worth a lot more than that of a person sweeping the street.

Time alone is easy. What you can comfortably live on, divided by the hours you work. It just leaves out the important variables of skills and services.

So, what - on average - are the skills and services of a webmaster worth?


Not sure there is such a clear cut answer though.. just as there is no clear cut definition of what a 'webmaster' (or whatever you want to call yourself) is.

Personally, what I charge for freelance work tends to be determined fairly randomly by me based on how much money I think I need at the moment, the perceived size of the job and my relationship with the client (friend, family, acquaintance, other). An OS Commerce customisation could be anywhere from €400 to €1,500 based on those things.

I've never been aware of any pricing guidelines when it comes to this sort of work. Would love to hear from people if they've got any though.

grahamor

I would guess that most freelancers charge between €30 and €60 an hour for their services.

Dont undersell yourself and make sure you take into consideration problems you might encounter that take a while to solve. Also, make sure the client doesnt start requesting new features once you have the project finished.

Hope it helps

di11on

It will be more work than you imagine... trust me.

There's a lot of stuff you need to add on top of the basic OSCommerce installation to make a decent shop out of it.

Estimate what time you will spend and double it and you'll still be underestimating the time. Then charge that time at a rate you believe is reasonable based on your skills and experience.

The previous poster is correct - you need to be clear at the start what the customer is getting. You should mention some optional extras which the customer can get if they want for an additional charge.. like:

- Search engine optimisation (the basic OSCommerce package needs a lot of work to be SE friendly)
- RSS Feed
- Google sitemap
- Thumbnailer
- Discount coupons
- Additional payment methods
- Article Functionality
etc. etc.

Be clear that there's a price for those additional items and work out the price based on the time it will take to implement them (find, install, debug and customise the appropriate contributions). Don't underestimate the work these will take.

And let me say again. It will take longer to implement than you think.

chamlis

Getting very scared. Reality is scary!

The guy is, well I guess he'd be a friend. I'm thinking 500 bucks before all else extra. This doesn't include hosting or domain registrtion.

I have a good idea that yes, stuff will happen that will take time or I didn't account for etc. But if this job goes well, his other associates are very interested in their own osCommerce websites too. The network of contacts will grow, as it were.
So I can view this as a learning project and then charge more with the others, if any, for what the job is really worth.

Breaking this thing down into prices and doing it in a professional manner are the main things I guess.

Some great advice here guys. Thanks very much and please keep it coming if there is more

axer

chamlis wrote: »

Getting very scared. Reality is scary!

The guy is, well I guess he'd be a friend. I'm thinking 500 bucks before all else extra. This doesn't include hosting or domain registrtion.

I have a good idea that yes, stuff will happen that will take time or I didn't account for etc. But if this job goes well, his other associates are very interested in their own osCommerce websites too. The network of contacts will grow, as it were.
So I can view this as a learning project and then charge more with the others, if any, for what the job is really worth.

Breaking this thing down into prices and doing it in a professional manner are the main things I guess.

Some great advice here guys. Thanks very much and please keep it coming if there is more

I'd advise you check out VirtueMart before you dig into OsCommerce. I have set up a few OsCommerce sites and they are a pain to deal with. It will be a while before OsCommerce 3 stable is out. VirtueMart also has the advantage of integrating with Joomla so the user can create other non catalog pages easily.

Jobs always take long than you expect so include that when calculating how long you expect it to take to complete - and then there is training and support.