Free tool
What does product data entry actually cost you?
Everybody knows loading a supplier range takes time. Almost nobody has put a number on it, because the work sits between departments and never reaches a budget line. Move the three sliders and find out.
The short answer
Building one complete product record for a technical item takes 20 to 40 minutes by hand. At 2 000 SKUs a year and 25 minutes each, that is 833 hours — roughly five months of one person's full working time — or about R125 000 a year at a loaded rate of R150 an hour. Below roughly 800 products a year, no software is worth buying.
Assumes 4 minutes per product to review and approve a captured record, and GetShopSync Growth at R5 400/month plus a R15 000 setup fee. Year one.
By hand
833 hrs
R125 000
With GetShopSync
133 hrs
R99 800
Hours returned to the business
700
Year-one rand difference: −R25 200 in your favour
How to get an honest number for your own business
The sliders above are a starting point built on measured defaults. Four steps turn them into a figure you could defend in a budget meeting.
- 01
Time ten of your own SKUs, end to end
With a stopwatch, from opening the supplier page to the record being live and correct. Not the typing — the whole job. Take the median, not the best one.
- 02
Work out your real hourly rate
Gross salary plus employer UIF, the skills development levy, COIDA, and provisions for leave and sick leave. Add roughly 25 percent for overhead. Divide by about 122 productive hours a month, not 176.
- 03
Multiply by the products you actually onboard a year
Use last year's number, not the target. Most businesses are surprised in both directions.
- 04
Add the three costs that never reach a budget
Rework on records that were wrong first time, knowledge that leaves when the person does, and the supplier range you did not take on because nobody had the capacity.
What is behind each number
| Input | Default | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Minutes per product | 25 | Measured range of 20–40 minutes for technical products, timed end to end. Simple consumables sit at the bottom; anything with a specification table, a compliance certificate or variants sits at the top. |
| Loaded hourly rate | R150 | Conservative. Built up properly for an administrator on R15 000 a month, the figure is about R187 — roughly 2.2× the naive salary-divided-by-hours number. |
| Review minutes per captured record | 4 | An estimate, and the weakest number here. Real review time depends on how strict your completeness rules are. Measure it during a pilot rather than trusting this figure. |
| GetShopSync cost | R79 800 | Growth at R5 400 a month for twelve months, plus the R15 000 setup fee. Year one, excluding VAT. |
If the answer comes out against us
Then believe it. Below roughly 800 products a year the manual process is genuinely cheaper, and the calculator will say so. We would rather you worked that out on this page than three months into a contract.
Common questions
- How much does product data entry cost?
- For technical products, between 20 and 40 minutes per SKU end to end, at a loaded rate of roughly R150 to R187 an hour in South Africa. Onboarding 2 000 SKUs a year at 25 minutes each is 833 hours, or about R125 000 of direct labour a year — a cost that almost never appears as a budget line.
- How long does it take to create one product record?
- Between 20 and 40 minutes for a technical product, timed end to end rather than timing only the typing. It includes finding the right supplier page for the exact part number, reading the specification, writing two descriptions, cropping the image, hunting down the datasheet, and checking the record rendered correctly.
- What hourly rate should I use for product data work?
- A loaded rate, not gross salary: pay plus statutory contributions plus a share of overhead, divided by genuinely productive hours rather than contracted ones. For a South African administrator on R15 000 a month that works out at about R187 an hour, against a naive figure of R85. R150 is a conservative working default.
- At what volume does automating product data pay for itself?
- Roughly 800 products onboarded a year. Below that, the software plus the review time costs more than doing the work by hand, and the correct decision is to carry on as you are.
The workings, in full
What product data onboarding actually costs
The 833-hour arithmetic in full, plus the three costs that never reach a budget.
The real hourly rate of your product data administrator
Why gross salary divided by contracted hours understates the true cost by 40 to 60 percent.
Pricing
Three plans in rand, and an honest list of who should not buy this.
Test the review-time assumption on your own catalogue.
Thirty minutes, three of your real supplier URLs, captured live. That is the number this calculator cannot give you.