How much should I charge for my services?

Before giving any price or thinking about a price, talk to the person and find out what are the requirements.. How many products does he needs in the site and if he is willing to use a CMS like wordpress..

Lets say the person is ok to use Wordpress, then you should think about taking the time and make a theme from scratch or using a premium theme.. If you decide to go down the path and build a theme from scratch be aware that you should have a strong foundation in PHP, PHP OOP, Functions, Wordpress Development and WooCommerce theme development, treehouse offers courses about all these topics, it might take you over 100 Hours to learn how to.

If you decide to use a Wordpress Premium theme these are the numbers you are looking:

Domain: 10$ - 15$ a year ** Hosting: 60$ - 100$ a year ** SSL Certificate : 75$ - 120$ a year ** Wordpress Theme : 35$ - 60$

** Paid by the client, check out different domains and hosting providers such as Godaddy.com / Hostgator.com

On top off that you should add how much you want to charge for theme customization, for these type of task you need to have a strong foundation on HTML, CSS, CSS3, again, Treehouse have all the courses you need.

As for the price for theme customization it really depends on each person, for example, I don't charge less than 400$ to make a site using a premium theme (the price doesn´t include the price list on top) includes: change logo, add images, and do minor changes to the CSS. If the clients needs big changes in the theme I´ll charge more.

On top of that you need to know if the person wants to have full control, if this is the case then you should charge the hours it will take to teach him/her, or you could create videos to teach the client how to use the theme.

To create the video I highly recommend you Screencast-o-matic, for these videos I'll charge 240$

Screencast-o-matic: 15$ a year.

If the client wants you to keep the site administration which includes updates, backups, etc... You could charge around 10$-40$ a month, it really depends on the ammount of new information beeing send to the site.

My best advice to you is to talk to your client but let him/her do all the talk, just listen, people love to talk about their business, ideas, etc... Again JUST LISTEN... Once the client is done talking ask your questions:

1.- Do you have a Domain? 2.- Do you have a hosting provider? 3.- It is ok to use a CMS like wordpress? 4.- Your questions....

Since this is an eCommerce site, be very specific on the ammount of products you will add to the site... This is one of the most important thing to do, I had a client that needed a eCommerce site at first the site had around 50 products the final product list were over 300 products.. So be VERY SPECIFIC! If you say 10 products it is 10 products and period.

Take notes , clients love that...

Do not give any price right away nor estimated time of delivery... If the client keeps asking for a price just say You will send a quote in an hour or two... Now lets say you want to charge 400$, charge him 450$ you will have 50$ to negotiate.. People looove to receive discounts..

Another Advice, don´t tell the client what you can do and how awesome the site might look, let him have his quality standard, whatever you do DO NOT RAISE that bar in the meeting... You will raise the bar when giving the client his site, he will be expecting something ok, but you won´t give him/her something ok, you will deliver something AMAZING! something that the client wasn´t expecting and that is how you make a client happy which translates in more clients..

I hope all this helps you..

Edit 1: One last advice.