I have an appliance repair business. I charge for labor and parts. I mark up my parts a flat percentage. How do I respond when a customer wants me to breakdown the cost of labor vs parts? Because I know what they are really trying to do is see if they can find the part cheaper on the internet.
There’s a couple ways you can deal with this:
Vague Part descriptions with retail price, ie “shop supplies,compressor, wiring harness, etc” and then labour. If you are confident your pricing is fair this is a safe way to cooperate.
put the markup in your labour. List all the detailed part numbers, then make sure what the customer googles for price matches what you will charge. The customer will see you giving a competitive price for parts and they can’t easily price check your labour. Don’t give them labour hours just a lump sum labour cost.
give them your detailed parts info, with markup and your detailed labour info. They may shop you and go somewhere else. They may ask you to take something out. You’ll have to decide how you handle that but I’ve had luck pointing out politely they came to me for help and this is what I need to do the job right and guarantee the result.
not share - depending what you are working on it can take a lot of unpaid time and effort to estimate the work. If you are polite about that, a reasonable customer will be understanding, and it’s perfectly fair to discuss it politely. Something like “I’m very sorry but we invest a lot of unpaid time and knowledge into researching what this repair requires. Any qualified shop should be able to look at the same information and provide you with a competitive quote.” You could also use a self depreciated way out “Because we’ve been burned in the past quoting on other shops incomplete estimates we wouldn’t quote you on this without looking at it ourselves, and other shops giving you a competitive price should make sure they assess and quote directly to make sure they don’t miss something important”
We generally assess the job and client and what they are worth to us. We’ve never done the hide the markup in the labour as that’s just not our style but it’s something we’ve had coaches bring up repeatedly.
Generally we don’t share part numbers but somehow clients still find ways to price check. It happens.
For the most part we’re transparent- we make our money by marking up stuff we buy elsewhere and charging labour. I’m not sharing what my markup is, that’s my business. I have worked with parts people bring in, but I scrutinize the heck out of them when they come in and if they are wrong, well I charge markup on parts I bring in and guarantee and labour on parts you bring in and I sort out. Markup is going to be cheaper.