Can you save money by purchasing your outdoor lighting products online and then hire a professional lighting company like us to install those products for you?
No. Here’s why:
The first thing you have to look at is the quality of the product itself. Are these cheap landscape lighting fixtures you bought professional grade, or “economy” stuff that you might be able to find at the big box stores? We can’t install cheaply made equipment because we can’t put our reputation on the line for inferior quality products which we have no control over.
If you have purchased professional grade products, the price we charge for the fixtures we install is generally well within $10 of what you can buy them for online (you’d save $10 per fixture). Now let’s say that your project requires 30 fixtures — which is a nice small to medium size project. In our little scenario you’ve just saved $300, as long as you didn’t have to pay any shipping. (We don’t charge shipping fees.)
Next up is installation. Since we couldn’t make any markup at all on the fixtures to help cover the cost of overhead (rent, gas, electricity, etc.), we will have to charge you more for labor to make up that lost revenue. That is probably going to be more than the $300 you saved on the products you purchased online.
Okay – you’ve bought your fixtures, and found someone to install them. Let’s suppose that a month or two down the road, a fixture goes out — what are you going to do? Who are you going to call? (Hint: not Ghostbusters!) Since you didn’t purchase the fixture from the installer/contractor, they won’t warranty it and/or cover the labor expenses to replace it. That contractor will charge a service fee to replace that one light, which will probably be somewhere around $150 or more (and be sure to have that replacement fixture handy when they get there). That’s just one little thing that went wrong. If anything else happens that’s not directly due to the installation of those products, there will be service charges to fix those as well.
How about regular maintenance? Silver Moon Lighting provides twelve full months of maintenance FREE for any outdoor lighting project over $10,000 we design and install. We do that because we are very confident in the products we use and our installation techniques. We know that although there may be an occasional product issue, it’s very unlikely that we are going have any major problems. But, of course, if we’re not providing those products from reputable distributors and manufacturers that we trust, we are not going to commit to taking care of them for free. We would have to charge a service of at least $150 per visit, and we recommend at least two visits a year. Over the initial twelve months, that’s at least $300 in maintenance fees.
Don’t forget the fact that are going to make up that initial $300 in installation labor fees because we didn’t get the material markup to help cover overhead. It is important to understand that value is more than the cost of a product. It’s all of the things that come along with that product price. Yes, you may pay a little more to buy the products from us, but we are there if/when something goes wrong. Think of that slightly higher product price as really cheap insurance. Cheap landscape lighting isn’t actually quite expensive.
