Starting a new business has its own challenges. One of the challenges is deciding on what services to offer and how much to charge for them? You may want to offer few services in the start to keep the management simpler. As you grow your business and get feedback from the customers you can think of adding additional services.
When you are deciding on the pricing of the services you offer, then consider the below things -
Competition – Its good to study your local competition. You don’t want to offer prices to low so the customers doubt your quality of service or to high so your customers look for lower price options. A happy medium is what you need to decide. Now as you gain customers and popularity, you can always think of raising your prices later. There are always exceptions. You can charge higher prices if you are targeting higher value customers and can differentiate your service.
Location - The prices do vary by your business location. You need to understand the market location you are in and decide your prices based on that.
Business Expenses - Most important thing to keep in mind is, you are in business to make profit. The price you decide need to ensure your expenses are covered and business is profitable.
Now giving discounts to your repeating customers, can make them happy and ensure regular business. DoTimely lets you offer different discounts like new customer, frequency based, package or subscription pricing.
We do recommend fixing a price per service as it makes the management easier for you. We do understand as you are stating your business you do tend to run some experiments and end up offering different prices to different customers. To make the maintenance easier for these initial customers DoTimely lets you assign custom rates to these customers and these custom rates are applied automatically when you create an appointment and run invoicing.
We have looked into thousand of our customer data and below are the average prices they are charging for the key services.
15 mins service - $15
30 mins service - $22
60 mins service - $32
Overnight service - $85
Also here are the additional surcharges they apply to these services.
Additional pet
Feeds/water/litter box change
Bathing
Nail Trim
Medication
Pet Transportation
Milage surcharge
Holiday surcharge
Weekend surcharge
Last min booking
Late cancellation
Last min booking
Late payment fee
We hope this data helps you to decide on the pricing for the services you offer for your business.