7 Custom Jewelry Pricing Mistakes That Are Costing You Money
Most independent jewellers undercharge by at least 20% without knowing it. Not because they lack skill — because the pricing habits that feel fine add up to real losses over time. Here are the seven that show up most consistently.
Using a static gold price from memory
Gold moves. It moves daily, sometimes significantly. A jeweller who rounds the spot price to a familiar number and uses it for weeks is systematically under- or over-quoting without knowing which. The error direction alternates with the market, but the result is the same: your quotes do not accurately reflect your material cost. At $85/g gold, being off by just $3/g on a 6-gram piece is an $18 error on materials alone — before markup.
Fix
Pull a live spot price for every quote. This can be automated with quoting software. If you are quoting manually, check a live rate source each time.
Forgetting the casting waste factor
When you cast a piece, you start with more metal than ends up in the finished work. Sprues, gates, and polishing remove metal that you paid for. That metal goes back into scrap, but scrap is recovered at 85–95 cents on the dollar at a refiner — not at the full spot price you paid. The 5–15% difference is a real cost and it belongs in your quote.
Fix
Add a waste factor of 8–12% to your metal weight before calculating material cost. For fabricated work, 5% is more appropriate than for cast work.
Undervaluing your bench time
The most common underprice in custom jewelry shops is labour. Jewellers systematically underestimate how long tasks take and use an hourly rate that does not reflect what their time is actually worth. A common trap: charging $40/hr when you need $70/hr just to cover wages, insurance and a reasonable draw. Tracking actual clock time for one week — not estimates, real minutes — often reveals 20–30% more time per job than expected.
Fix
Track actual time for one week. Calculate your minimum viable rate: your target annual income divided by productive bench hours per year (not total working hours). Use that as your floor.
Not pricing overhead per job
Rent, insurance, tools, software and marketing are all real costs that do not disappear when a job is complete. If you only recover materials and labour in your quotes, your overhead is being subsidized by your profit margin. Shops that do not allocate overhead per job often find they are profitable on paper but not in their bank account.
Fix
Add up all fixed monthly costs. Divide by the average number of jobs per month. Add that number to every quote as an overhead line — or fold it into your hourly rate.
Quoting without an expiry date
A quote without an expiry date is a liability. If a client comes back three months later to accept a quote you wrote when gold was $20/g cheaper, you are obligated to honor a price that no longer covers your costs. This happens more than most jewellers track — especially for higher-value pieces where clients take time to decide.
Fix
Set a 30-day expiry on all quotes. Note the gold price that was locked at quote time. GemQuote does both automatically.
Applying the same markup to everything
Marking up a $4,000 diamond at 3× produces a very different outcome than marking up a $40 setting fee at 3×. High-cost stones already contribute significant dollar margin at lower percentage markups. Labour-intensive custom work should carry a higher markup because it is harder to compare across shops. A flat blanket multiplier does not match the economics of different job types.
Fix
Use tiered markup by job type. Materials-heavy jobs: lower percentage, meaningful dollar margin. Labour-intensive custom work: higher markup to reflect skill premium. Repairs: price against the local market.
Spending 60+ minutes on a quote you never get paid for
Every quote that does not close represents unpaid time. If you spend 90 minutes building a detailed quote and the client goes elsewhere, you recovered nothing. The time cost of quoting is a real overhead item that needs to be recovered across the jobs you do win. Reducing quote time without reducing quote quality is one of the highest-leverage improvements a custom jewelry shop can make.
Fix
Use a quoting system that handles the metal calculation, stone pricing and PDF automatically. The goal is 5 minutes per quote, not 90. The faster you can quote accurately, the more quotes you can send, and the more jobs you win.
Fix mistakes 1, 2 and 7 in one move
GemQuote pulls live gold prices, handles the waste factor calculation automatically and gets your quote done in under 5 minutes. Accurate prices, fast quotes, professional PDF your client can approve online.
Start quoting correctly