I have been running in to a peculiar phenomenon lately with customers. I make most of my jewelry to-order and sell online. For some designs, in gold, I can calculate an overall price to offer across all sizes as the weight does not increase a ton when scaling up. Some other designs, however, have solid, thick areas that can increase in weight dramatically. I don’t have the time to update the price for 48 sizes every time gold fluctuates.
For those designs I have a listing for $0 that clearly is titled QUOTE and in the description it says for a price quote in your size, delivered via email. Customers can enter their desired ring size, stone etc and then I get an email I can respond to with an accurate quote. Saves me time and saves them money.
LATELY however, I have been getting more and more people who apparently don’t know what a quote is? They think I am just giving away solid gold jewelry for free and then accuse me of running a scam when the price “changes” from 0 to whatever it may be.
Has anyone else dealt with this before? How do you intake price inquiries for your designs? Do people just not have a literate vocabulary anymore?
The programming languages that would be required to work with web pages never interested me, I’m an unrepentant COBOL programmer, but an experienced web programmer could write a single script used by your website to post the price of gold, per ring, automatically.
You’d need to have a file specifying the weight of gold for each item (could be in a free LibreOffice, or Microsoft Office spreadsheet) , and presumably the cost of gold in another file you update each day, although that possibly could be taken off the internet by the script.
For a person who codes for the internet, it would be a simple job.
I’ve always believed computers should do work for people, rather than in your case your having to do the work for the website (sending individual email quotes).
Neil A
Call it an estimate. Gotta meet the customer where they are. Sorry it’s frustrating!
Hi,
idea-
you price the ring as a size 7 (or whatever)
and then say something like “other sizes are available as a custom order, please contact for a price quote and delivery. Pricing varies by size, due to weight and current gold pricing”…
julie
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Then you are dealing with stupid people or smart people just trying to take advantage of you. I have the same problem when I am asked what a bracelet will cost when made in gold. I tell them that I won’t really know until it is done since the price of gold varies from day to day. If pressed for a ball park price, I quote one that is fairly high, and if they say go ahead, the final price is usually less and they are happy. Good luck…Rob
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Most of my business is at Art Shows and high end craft fairs. I don’t carry gold jewelry with me to shows so if there is interest I give customers my card and tell them to call me for an estimate. I think “estimate” sound less specific or definite than “quote” altho’ I imagine Roget would view them as the same.
There is always someone who would like an on the spot gold price for a bracelet. I try to offer a comparison that a customer can see and feel. My wife wears one of my bracelets that is 14k yellow gold and I always have the same bracelet in the same size in sterling. Before we do a show I price her bracelet for the current cost and I have those prices to offer a comparison between the two. If I were doing a show today I would explain that gold is about 82.5 times more expensive per ounce than silver on the present market. I know that’s a lot of information for some folks to wrap around. But I can get further into the weeds when I explain the metals you hear about on Cramer’s show are bullion gold and silver were as I only work in sterling and 14k yellow.
As an aside:
Before I retired to a life of music and silversmithing I had a boss who had MS’s in Speech Pathology and Public Administration. When asked, she told me if her husband gave her a bracelet in gold it wouldn’t matter to her if it was 14k or 10k, it was the word gold that mattered and not the karat weight.
Don
Non-professional here, so non-professional-level comment: Could you simply make your markup large enough so it would balance out in the long run? I anticipate that gold prices don’t usually fluctuate wildly, plus you’d often be working with metal purchased previously, sometimes at a higher price and other times lower. Might a large enough markup balance out different ring sizes and gold prices over a several-month period?
You’re right, gold prices don’t fluctuate wildly. It’s more due to the time it takes me to calculate and estimate how much gold it will cost me to make a piece. I don’t have the weight for every size listed in a book somewhere for every design I have, that would take forever, so I update as I go with orders that come in.