What it costs you, and what you charge

Start with what leaves your pocket. Card and printing prices move, and they vary by seller, quantity and country, so this names the line items rather than a figure that would be wrong by the time you read it. Price a small test pack yourself, today, and write your own numbers next to these.

The trap: pricing off the plastic

Because the card is cheap, the instinct is to add a bit and call it a price. Do not. Your materials are the smallest part of what you deliver, and if you price off them you have built yourself a job that pays for card stock.

Here is what actually leaves your hands on a sale: a review link that has been checked against the correct profile, a tag written and tested on more than one phone, a QR that scans at the printed size in bad light, the object placed where the ask happens, and five minutes teaching the staff the sentence. That last part is most of whether the thing works at all, and it is the part nobody selling a box of cards online is doing.

The two numbers that set the price

Your floor: what the batch cost you, plus the time to build and deliver it. Not your ideal hourly rate, just an honest hour. Below the floor you are volunteering.

Their ceiling: what one new customer is worth to that business. Ask them. Some will have the number to hand and some will have never worked it out, and both answers tell you something about who you are talking to. A shop where one customer is worth a haircut prices differently from a shop where one customer is worth a transmission rebuild, and the card is the same card.

A rule of thumb that needs no invented figure: one card should sell for more than a whole pack of blanks costs you. If it does not, change the number or change the customer. And price where an owner can say yes on the spot, without a meeting and without asking a partner, because a walk-in sale that turns into a decision process is usually a walk-in sale that dies.

One-off, or a monthly?

A one-off is the honest default. You made a thing, you delivered it, they paid for it, it is theirs. Simple to sell, simple to explain, nothing to cancel.

A monthly is only a fee if something arrives every month. Apply that test with no mercy, because a recurring charge for a piece of plastic that already sits on a counter is the exact thing that gets somebody called a scammer in a town where everybody knows everybody, and there is no recovering from that with the next twenty shops on the same street.

Things that genuinely arrive every month, if you actually do them:

• Replacement and extra cards as staff change and cards get lost, which they do.
• A check that the review link still resolves. Profiles get merged, renamed and moved, and a dead card is worse than no card.
• A short written note of how the profile's review count has moved, counted by hand, with no promises attached to it.
• A ten-minute retrain when there are new staff, because the staff sentence is the part that decays.
• A second and third placement as you learn where the asks actually happen in that shop.

Understand the trade before you offer one. A monthly makes the first sale harder, adds a cancellation conversation, and can cost you the one-off you already had in your hand. Sell the one-off first. Offer the monthly at the follow-up visit, after you have already done a month of the work in front of them once.

Getting paid

For the first few, take payment on delivery, not on order. It removes the refund conversation almost entirely and it forces you to actually deliver. Have your payment method open on your phone before you walk in, and have a plan for cash, including change, because some of these shops will hand you notes.