Dealing with prices for multiple orders

[Graham Scanlan]

Hi Dan,

I’ll watch this post with interest, I’m assuming your digitally printing the boards. In the days of screenprinting boards the more boards printed meant the cost would reduce due to the setup cost being spread over the volume. with digital, the costs remain constant, in fact the more boards you do the more work is involved. It will be down to how much margin you want to give away,

[David Hammond]

At the end of the day it costs, what it costs.

Whether they order 10 boards, or 100 boards, your vinyl, ink, materials and time costs are the same. (As Graham said)

There’s two ways to price it, per board and you earn X per board.

For larger orders, reduce the margin on your materials, and charge for the time, you’ll need a good handle on what your running costs are, but you can be happy knowing you’re confident you’re making £X overall. Trouble being you could be making more than X doing other stuff.

An alternative is to outsource the job, you may make less, but you’re literally placing an order, and someone else does the leg work.

All said and done, some jobs simply aren’t worth doing.

[David McDonald]

Hi mate

What unit cost is he after and what quantity?

Give or take a few mm’s these are residential estate agent board sizes. You can find sources online, 6mm correx, digitally printed, double sided as low as £6 each + vat. Unless you print very large volumes all day long on very fast large scale uv printers you are never going to get close on price and it be worthwhile doing them in house.

Hopefully the price your customer is requesting is above this level by a margin and he’s unaware of any online, as mentioned just buy them in. Only problem is the ones I’d come across online weren’t even trade suppliers and were available to anyone.

We have a reasonable uv flatbed and a new Kongsberg cutter but £36 for an 8×4 6mm correx board – nope we’ve got better things to be doing!

Generally for volume discounts we work out the absolute cost price for production and add increasing margin on as quantities get smaller. If it’s something is very large then we’ll do some online benchmarking first but as Dave mentions we can’t go below our costs / minimum margin level regardless of what others are offering.

Cheers

Dave

[David Wilde]

Like others have said, if he’s after a cost which you are unhappy dropping to, I would either walk away or see if you can get them online.

That said, I’m not against discounting for volume on this kind of thing. Not huge discounts but trying to get somebody to take the remainder of the sheet and charging multiples of each sheet going forward.

Ie, 1 sign is usually £25, i might get 6 signs from a sheet. So I may charge £120 for 6, £240 for 12 etc.

There is still a bit of ‘set up’ involved for digitally printed signs. Artwork / Ripping, Printer set up, Lamination, trimming etc. Although the margins are small I have found it better to spend an hour selling 6 signs than 45 mins selling 1.

[David Wilde]

I have to say though, if he is telling you how much he wants to pay, he doesn’t seem like the kind of customer you are ever going to be ‘winning’ with. Every future order will be subject to further negotiation and like Dave mentioned, you could be doing other ‘full paid’ work instead.

[Chris Wilson]

Think everyone else has touched on the about really.

But helps if margin as big as you can for singles. I.e we will do a single mug for £10 + VAT. But I’ll do you a box of 36 for £180 + VAT.

We did 20 sheets of correxs the other day. Basically one boy all day, and we cleared £637 profit out of it. However going on my single sheet rate it should of been £940. Still not bad for a days work depending on your overheads, and a printer tied up for a day and bit a few days before. And least I only had to type one email about them. Deal with one bit of artwork. Instead of 20 different customers. 20 different emails.

[Jamie Wood]

We don’t get involved in price wars. On larger runs, we work out a price per 8 x 4, including time for trimming, then divide that by however many smaller boards you can yield from the sheet, to give your price per sign. If it’s a lot of smaller boards, there will be more cutting, so the price goes up a bit. If they want it cheaper, then we usually invite them to go elsewhere. If it’s a lot of signs, we outsource and add a margin.

[Kevin Mahoney]

This client clearly thinks he’s got some buying power, whats his idea of quantity? If it’s 10 or 20, tell him to look online. If it’s a 1000 or more, you look online.

I have to say though, if a client tell me he’s not paying the asking price, I’m dropping him, not the quote. You will set a president for future work & just end up wasting valuable time on him for no reward. Had a guy in the other day wanting a cost for 20 full coverage 8’x4’ 6mm correx, said he already had a price of £8 each. I asked ‘exactly how much cheaper do you think you can get this? Give them the £8 & stop wasting everybody’s time’ Not the reply he was expecting.

Appalled at what some people expect, I can put my feet on the desk & earn nothing, don’t need to run around for that

[Dan]

Hi all

Thanks for the feedback and sorry it’s taken so long to reply, had a job I had to get out and no it wasn’t this one.

The customer has been with me for many years and loyal which made me ask the question and to be honest I want more volume work. He’s generally ok with my prices which makes me think he’s been told he can get the boards cheaper and in all honesty, how loyal are customers at the end of the day.

I’ve made the boards before so I have the design, he normally orders 15 of them, he now wants 75.

I’ve worked out my costs, changed to a cheaper monomeric material and still clearing a profit getting down to the price he wants.

I’ll trim the prints 1mm inside the board so it will be a quick install using my table so I expect to have these made in a day

It keeps my customer happy, I’m still making a profit but I’ll remember the advice for other jobs.

I sometimes get asked the same question with a van, my reply to these is normally the cost is the cost but if it’s the same van and i can do multiple in a day then there will be a discount based on time needed to complete the job.