Estimating service pricing on a client-by-client basis can be difficult and time-consuming. It’s risky for the service provider because they invest time before receiving a commitment from the client. And clients can get annoyed when they have no expectation for cost early in the relationship.
Houston, we have a problem
Elias faces this tension on a daily basis. Let’s say we receive an estimate request with project description from a new potential client. Ok, now what? We try to get more information. The potential client is trying to understand price. And agency partners want a faster way to incorporate Elias development costs into their bids for client Magento ecommerce opportunities. So I created packaged services to frame scope and help clients see the effects of feature configuration/development on price.
Solution (v1)
- Package services for typical client requests to quickly set expectations for scope and budget.
- Reduce package variation to minimal number of factors.
- Establish a conversational starting point when discussing a project with a new client.
- Make the purchase decision easier for clients.
- Distill scope differences between packages into an easy to consume format.
Result (v1)
![packages-v1-1 Packages v1](http://eliasinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/packages-v1-1-237x300.jpg)
While this initial version of our Magento service packages did set expectations for scope and budget upfront, it failed on multiple levels of design:
- The pricing was not simple.
- Awful borders held the table captive.
- Don’t even get me started on my poor original names
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Solution (v2)
Tyler Tate recently featured a fantastic article in Smashing Magazine about minimizing complexity in user interfaces. He illustrated one of his points with a pricing chart from Typekit. Their example gave me the inspiration I needed to create version 2 of Elias’ packages:
Result (v2)
![Packages v2](http://eliasinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/packages-v2-1-240x300.jpg)
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