I have a client who wants me to add his product inventory to his website and to his register systems. I am unsure of how much to charge as because even after the addition of his 5000 plus products, he needs me to continually keep his systems updated. This could be a minimum 2 year project he says. How much should I charge for the initial upload of inventory into the system, then to keep his inventory on his website updated daily? Please help I’ve got to give him an answer by monday. I’m used to charging for design and program projects, but i never get into the inventory aspect of it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Does your client expect that you will be outsourcing/ subcontracting this project or do they understand that you, the designer/programmer will be doing it and that your rates are higher than a temp or basic data entry employee?
my client understands that I will be performing the work myself
My initial thought was $500 a week(based on a 40 hour work week) for up to 1000 entries and $0.35 each additional entry within the course of that week. Based on what has to be done, I can safely assume I should be able to process 25 entries an hour.
At 25 entries an hour and $500 for 1000 entries you’d be making $12.50 an hour for your base hours and $8.75 per hour after that @ $0.35/ entry. I don’t know where you live or what you charge but that seems like a very low rate for a skilled developer/ designer… is that on par with what you make now?
no that’s not really on ‘par’ but then again, I don’t want to lose this deal. I’m from kentucky, and right now, business is extremely slow due to the economy. So I’m willing to sacrifice a little. Also a point to add is that my business has only been up and running for less than 6 months. Not to say I lack experience, cause I’ve been designing websites for years, but as far as my business goes, my ‘name’ is not really out there yet. Any thoughts?
My personal advice would be to up the rate… maybe $500 for the first 750 listings and $0.50 per listing thereafter. While it may be a bit below your rate you do want to sell your services higher than that of a data entry job. However if you’re ok with the rate and feel it pays the bills well enough then by all means go for it. I do like the idea of setting an “up to” retainer service for the initial listings but I’d suggest carefully defining what is a listing and what is not (copying files from two excel sheets is one thing, downloading and cropping and hand resizing 3 images is another).
base your rate on how much you need per hour. A professional business should be averaging $75-$100 per hour. An individual with no overhead, should still make at least 25-40 per hour if you really qualify for the work.
thanks for the suggestions.
Don’t forget you’ll have to pay taxes on that income, so then $500 a week turns into $350 a week which (in the US) is not enough to really live off.
Even outsourcing, I would say the rate is too low. We’ve charged $35/hour for data entry before and had interns doing the work… and we barely made money.
Also a very important consideration is the opportunity cost of this project. If you’re doing all the work yourself, what happens if a better opportunity (an actual design/development project) comes by? If you’ve already committed to doing data entry full-time for $500 a week, how will you build your portfolio so you can expand your client base and increase your hourly rate?
Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me…
Figure how much you can do in one hour, and how much you want to make in an hour. $20 is reasonable. I would also recommend setting a minimum charge per request equal to 30 min or an hour. It’s the small jobs that will kill you.
Why don’t they use a CSV database upload? hook it up to the database, organize it in a csv file or access and upload it.
Yeah, I always try and sell them on a script like that instead.
Why don’t they use a CSV database upload? hook it up to the database, organize it in a csv file or access and upload it.
You will still have to input the information into the csv file, which may save time versus hand coding and uploading an image at a time, but not really.
And for my thoughts, do not under sell your self! For many reasons, but mostly clients go for the best price but if you are unbelievably too cheap, they may run away. Give them a fair price, I’d say $35-$45 per hour, no less. I’m in California and charge $60 for large projects and over $100 for the small ones. You will still be under bidding me and doubling your money.