Save money by buying cheap landscape lighting online!
Can you save money by purchasing your outdoor lighting products online? Then hire a professional lighting company like us to install those products for you? Some people think you can; but I’m pretty sure that’s just a myth. 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 is it the real “economy” stuff that you might be able to find at the big box store? Let’s just say that it is, in fact, a professional grade product for this argument, because I really don’t know much about those other products (and we won’t install them anyway).
I know that the price I charge for the fixtures we install is generally well within $10 of what you can buy them for online, so let’s say you save $10 on each fixture you purchase online. 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 the contractor/installer couldn’t make any markup at all on the fixtures to help cover the cost of their overhead (rent, gas, electricity, etc.), they will have to charge you more for their 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. (Hey, we have expenses other than labor!)
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 $75 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? My company provides two years of maintenance for the outdoor lighting systems 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 $75 per visit, and we recommend at least two visits a year. Over three years, that’s at least $450 in maintenance fees.
So, that $300 savings in the beginning has actually cost at least $225 more at minimum, over just a few years. Don’t forget the fact that the installer/contractor is probably going to make up that initial $300 in installation labor fees because they didn’t get the material markup to help cover overhead. So it’s actually going to cost at least an extra $550 to buy the products online.
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 the lighting contractor, but at least they are actually there if/when something goes wrong. Think of that slightly higher product price as really cheap insurance. Cheap landscape lighting isn’t so cheap.
Contact us here today if you would like us to provide and install an amazing outdoor lighting system for you or at least set up a free at-home consultation with a certified outdoor lighting pro.
