Helpful Tools To Price Handmade

 Handmade is by it's very nature, difficult to price.There are so many factor in deciding what the retail price of an item is going to be, and it doesn't help that we artisans tend to be more creative in thinking rather than business oriented.

Sometimes, pricing gets set based on emotions, because of what other people are pricing, or based on what the person setting the prices would pay for it.

None of those are good business (although it can pay to be aware what others are charging and selling similar items for).

Here are a couple tools that may help anyone set pricing.

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

 This calculator takes in your yearly expenses, how many hours you'll work, how many of them are actually billable (IE, you work 1 hour making a product, and one hour getting it out there, you have a 50% billable rate), etc, and tells you how much you'll need to charge per billable hour to make ends meet, and how much you'll need to charge per hour to get what you want.


 http://www.rolbe.com/etsy.htm

This calculator takes a potential price, what you charge for shipping, what you are charged for shipping, your materials cost, and tells you what etsy and paypal fees are going to be

To get true business profit, add your hourly wage to the materials section.

The calculator was originally built to calculate for etsy and paypal fees, but you can exclude either one and even change them to fit a merchant account or another selling site.

Between the 2 above, you can get a pretty decent view of what you need to charge to have a healthy business.