I am sure this has been posted about time and time again..but today I am just fuming. There is a woman who makes cakes in the same town as me and I just found out she has been contacting me (under different names) getting quotes from me and then going back to her customers and giving them a price. Meanwhile I've been wasting my time, giving her details and options and pricing things out..meanwhile she sits back and get all her quotes done for her..easy peasy!

I live in a "small-ish" custom cake market, and basically everyone knows each other..so how she thought she'd never get caught is beyond me! I'm usually a mild mannered "cake lady", but I feel like throwing a mud pie in her face right about now. 

Yikes, I'm sorry this happened to you! That's ridiculous of her; I will never understand some people.

...do you have a mud pie handy??

Have you called her and told her to cut it out?

And I may have also thrown out that her cakes were basically crap..which I am not proud of; but I was just so shocked and mad at the whole thing. Usually I'm nice and dipolmatic but this just pushed me over the edge and made me become a person I don't want to be like 

Wait.  SHE said you were unprofessional?

Has she looked in a mirror?

Wow, she got you good. I was going to say to make a fake quote, but I see you've already done that.

Rise above it, delete any emails, and pretend you are your own employee... Would you want someone wasting precious working time corresponding with that? Probably not. You're on to her, she may even stop (but don't count on it). 

AThat's really good advice, "pretend you are your own employee"!

AAgreed, rise above... Don't give her any more of your time or energy, she's not worth it. In the end, the better businesswoman will prevail. :-)

This is slightly off topic, but it gives me a good chance to bring up a question I've been wondering:  The advice I keep getting for figuring out how to price cakes is to be comparable to your local competition.  But how do you find out your local competition's prices?  They don't generally list them online here.  The only way I can think of is to do what this lady has done - ask them for a quote so you can compare what you would charge, but I haven't done it because just like this I feel it would be dishonest and slimy.

How else would you find out your competitor's prices?  Would it be better to be upfront and e-mail them saying "I want to sell cakes like yours, please tell me what you charge so I can compete."?  That also feels pretty uncool.

AYOU may not see the benefit in undercutting and other shady behavior, but a LOT of newbues and just plain ignorant decorators believe that's the way to do it. Look at other businesses out there, like oil change places, painters, tax preparers. "We'll meet or beat any price!" Why not with cakes? That's not an endorsement of that kind of behavior, but to someone in this business strictly to move product, or with no sense of what profit is...it's completely acceptable.

And I absolutely despise the whole practice of getting quotes from others to price your own cakes. If you want to get a general feel for what Suzy down the street charges, sure, that's VITAL information, absolutely necessary. But to repeatedly do it, I'm all for giving outrageous low quotes to screw them up if I know that's what's going on.

I had someone do that to me once.  Her email asking for a quote was incredibly detailed, so I googled her email address and found her 'cake' Facebook page.  This is what I replied:

"Hi,

AThis thread is about some piece of work too lazy to quote out her own cakes. Please, let's not confuse it with appropriate checking of market prices. Any competitor with any sense at all would rather quote out a few cakes to help you get a feel for pricing than have you undercharging. . Be concise, give them all the info they need to quickly quote out a cake.

Do you want to know what is slimy? Not doing your due diligence to learn what to charge and not having the backbone to charge it.

And beware who you get your pricing info from. I had a conversation with someone on this board who had gotten together with a group of people in her area agreeing on what prices should be and they were all undercharging. It literally turned out we were in the same town and I serve the same area as this person. Well not exactly . I [I]should [/I]serve the same area, but don't because her group of 10 or whatever ruined the market on the north side of town. Well, I live on the north side of town, but sell most of my cakes far west, central and south because they brought prices down on the north side of town.

I'm not making that up. I'm sure the thread can be found .

There's nothing wrong with finding out what other bakers in your area charge, but the issue with the woman in question seems to be that she's using other bakers to do her quotes for her. There are going to be a range of pricing options in any market, and even though you know what other people charge doesn't mean that you should use that as a basis for your pricing. You don't want to be so outrageously out of the range of "normal" for your area, but it shouldn't be what determines your prices.

If everyone in your area is charging $2 a serving, and your cakes cost $2 a serving to make, should you charge $2 a serving? No, obviously not. You have to look at your own costs including advertising, licensing, blah blah blah plus the time it takes to make the cake and deal with customers, and that's your price. It's an individual issue that you can't base on what other people are charging.

That's why I asked why you consider Walmart the competition. I think of competition as people who have similar products and pricing to you. Walmart isn't really your competition because the people who shop there are basing their purchase on price. You want the customers who don't do that so that you can charge what the cake is worth, which is what your'e saying when you mention teaching people about why they shouldn't go to Walmart. So I see what you mean, but If someone wants to go to Walmart just because they're basing their buying decision on price, they're not your customer, and Walmart isn't your competition.

You mentioned the idea of low price= better, and that isn't really Walmart's angle. They play the low price=saves you money card. Even if people know that something more expensive is better, it doesn't mean that they care if their priority isn't getting a better cake, and a lot of people really don't care. They're just shopping for price, that's their priority, and they'll never be your customer.

Your competition is the people who do cakes that are similar to the cakes that you make, and who don't try to get the Walmart customer. Identifying them as competition doesn't mean that you have to undercut them and act all shady. Personally, I find that it makes more sense to not bother with the competition and just concentrate on your own marketing. I'm a home-based baker and I do mainly custom wedding cakes, and my competition are the other bakers in town who do custom weddings, whether they're store-front or home-based. I really don't pay attention to what any of them are doing, to tell the truth. Maybe once a year I'll think about checking their pricing, so I look on their websites, but for the most part I don't look at anything they're doing or their facebook pages or websites or anything. It makes more sense to pay attention to my own business and network with venues and other vendors who will be referring me to brides.

Walmart is definitely not my competition, because if someone wants to save money on the cake they're not going to come to me anyway. Not everyone is your customer and that's fine.

I'm probably rambling at this point but I hope you see what I'm talking about!

I agree with a lot of whats being said here. If she had called me up and just said "Hi! I'm (From such and such cakes), and I am just wondering about your pricing". I would have been much more open to that conversation. Every day on this site people are constantly asking about pricing and don't mind talking to her about how to properly price cakes, honestly. She's an unregistered home business and I would have talked to her about that and how to get everything legitimate. Yes, it is business but I'm confident enough in my own work to know that she isn't really my competition; she's a cheep cake lady, who probably doesn't really understand the business end. I just don't like having my time wasted providing quotes that were never going to come to anything. 

AExactly, it's a waste of time. Because of my gigantimous fan count on my Facebook page (and don't for one second interpret that as bragging, don't get me started on the utter BS that comes with that many fans, I'd prefer to go back to my unnoticed ten thousand or so), I get multiple time wasting messages a day. Everything from people requesting cakes from other continents, to "plzzzz like my page", to spamming, to winks and flirting (?!?!), to questions about pricing, to you name it. Waste. Of. Time.Arrggh! Sorry...went off topic there. :D

Yes, it's rude, it's irresponsible, and it's lazy.

My wife and I welcome competition.  That is, real competition that can hold a candle to our quality of taste and decoration.  The biggest problem we face if people that aren't licensed and have their health department permits.  We've spent sizable sums to be 'legal'.  I'll even send folks to our 'real' competition for dates which we have booked up.  However, I'll also report folks to the Health Department that aren't willing to go through the right process.  It's not cheap, but, it's the law.  Everyone should play by the same rules.  If they're playing underhand with you, then I see no reason to 'play fair' with them.  They're the one's that are trying to be deceitful, not you.

A

If she's unregistered why don't you just turn her in? The health department would just come out and tell her to stop selling or get legal. That would take care of the issue of her being a sneaky wench, too.