Member Avatar for rusty1001

Hi All

I am not sure if this is the correct section to discuss or you discuss this type of subject but..

I have a client that have will need 2000 images and data entry, for an oscommerce style site product catalog - may no prices at this time, I was wondering what is the going rate for this type of work, I was thinking a charge per item, rather than an hourly rate, sometimes this can be fiddly and can take a while, what do you recommend?

cheers
Rusty
:)

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Summary tied to the thread: asked whether to charge per-item or hourly for a large product catalog import with lots of images and data entry. correctly encouraged a fixed-price-versus-hourly discussion and pointed out database/import compatibility; other replies noted marketplace options. The most practical approach is to scope, measure, then price — not guess.

Recommend method (practical steps)

  • Run a small, paid pilot: prepare a representative batch and time every step (image prep, data entry, validation). Use that timing to calculate a per-item rate with an explicit overhead multiplier to cover setup, QA, and unexpected fiddliness. A compact formula that works well in proposals is shown below.
per_item_price = hourly_rate * (time_per_item_minutes / 60) * (1 + overhead_fraction)
  • Offer a hybrid contract: fixed price for the known bulk work (based on the pilot) plus an hourly rate for out-of-scope items, migrations, or bug fixes. Stage delivery in milestones and require client sign-off on each milestone.

Automation, import and QA

  • Automate image resizing/format work and metadata removal with tools such as ImageMagick and ExifTool (ImageMagick, ExifTool). Create a canonical filename -> SKU mapping so images import cleanly.
  • Export/import product rows via CSV or bulk loaders rather than one-by-one entry; most SQL engines support fast bulk import (see MySQL’s LOAD DATA INFILE for an example) (MySQL LOAD DATA INFILE).
  • Define acceptance criteria in the contract: required image dimensions, filename convention, required fields, data-cleaning rules, allowed revision cycles, and a short warranty/fix period after go-live.

Business notes

  • Capture setup hours (templates, scripts, mapping) separately from per-item work. Make the pilot deliverable refundable against the full job if the client proceeds. Mention of marketplaces by is useful for benchmarking, but real quotes should be based on the measured pilot and the contract terms above.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for Dani

I wish I could help you but I really don't know. However, it would probably be more beneficial for both you and the developer do either come up with a fixed price in advance or by the hour. Once the system is developed, it shouldn't be very time consuming at all to migrate in all the items, especially if they're already in some type of database.

Member Avatar for rusty1001

Thanks for the reply

I was thinking that the rate of work for that was 30/40 per hour freelance and I can do 6 per hour would that be reasonsible. Is that rate fair per hour? I have seen some asking 10 per hour for programming which seems low to me, but I guess it depends on what it is - this may invlove some resizing image manipulation as part of the service,, The reason iI want it per product is in ths case people wont worry about time, swings and roundabouts. I thinking there web is now on .cfm ( cold fusion) and will being going .php so not sure if the db will be compatable.

Thanks for the help.

Russell
:-)

Member Avatar for Dani

ColdFusion and PHP are server-side programming languages which need to interact with a database ... the database could either be MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, etc. Although I'm not familiar with the details, a database specialist should be able to import an Oracle db into MySQL or such.

How much to pay a developer is dependant upon how much experience they have, how sought after they are, how good they are, and so many other factors. It could range from $10/hour for an undergraduate computer science student to $200/hour and up for a professional with 20 years work experience.

Member Avatar for stswimfan

try out

Member Avatar for fionix

If you compare to IFreelancer or RentACoder, then I guess maybe $500 would be the max you could take for it, maybe more.

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