How do you normally charge? By the hour or by the job?

Let me tell you, I run a small web hosting company (www.cohenwebsvc.com, yes I’ll shamelessly plug myself, and yes, my own website is no way near as good as my customers’ sites) and it is these “little jobs” that are my biggest problem. For example, I have one customer (pays a flat fee for HOSTING) who always wants me to modify his site — even after I built pages so that he can modify it himself (I can’t dump him, he is both a friend and one of my first customers).

My worry is that you will not charge enough for all of the work you are going to have to do. Setting up the items and taking the pictures is going to take 10-30 minutes each — and that assumes that the customer has all of the items ready for you to photograph. How long it takes to crop will be a function of how good you are with your toolset.

Suggestion? don’t create a button for each item. Rather, use an off the shelf e-commerce product (there are several that are free) or use a database and php or perl to dynamically create the page and the button. This way, you create the pages once. You only have to add/remove records from your db as your customer adds/removes things.

For charging: I would have a fixed fee for the pages and database. Then a per-piece charge for the photos. Good luck

Ask Audra @
http://www.ecommerce-resources.org/
she knows all about it.

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Email me for more info: sales@omnitranz.com