E-Commerce Site Costs?

[jgallen23]

I always hate coming up with costs for creating a webpage, so I come to you guys for advice. I'm creating an e-commerce site, with a full shopping cart, admin page, full design, etc... could you guys give me an estimate of what I should charge?

thanks

[Serex]

how much do they sell for on say hotscripts? just go and compare the functions of your e-commerce site, to a familiar one of theirs. its a bit hard for us to estimate when we havent even seen it : ;)

[startbar]

if you do a good job - no less than £800

[raf]

hmm. not trying to put you down or so, but personally, given the huge abundance in free, featurepacked, fully tested and supported choppingcarts, i'd need to be realy impressed about the features and codequality before even considering using it, let alone paying for it.

If you wrote this for a specific client, then you should have already agreed on a price. If you wrote this as a package to commercialise, then i frankly think you stepped into a saturated part of the market.
I think that for this specific product, it'll be easier and more profitable to offer a complete service sollution : you setting up the cart, administrating it for the client (the real admin work, not just looking at the management information about sales ect), doing the maintenance, customizing the features and design, integrating it with a clients site to give it the same look and feel, maybe doing the db-hosting or whatever).
Short time-to-market (implementationtime) and being able to offer a low cost of ownership (if it's all opensource for *nix hosting then the recurrent costs will be limited to your maintenancefee) are probably the only points where you can make a real difference, compaired to the dozens (hundreds?) of free shoppingcarts.

But i wouldn't hope on £800. Just look at the prices at www.hotscripts.com None of them are that high, and these are usually packages that are already second or third improved and bug-cleaned versions.

[bcarl314]

I agree with raf here. Don't reinvent the wheel. I've set up several shopping cart for clients. Lately I've been going with oscommerce which seems to be very nice and well documented / supported with a 2checkout.com gateway. Total cost to me to set it up is around $50. But I can charge a significant amount for installation, set up, and loading products to make it quite lucrative.

In fact, the more I get into web site development, the more I've come to realize that the real money isn't in coding per se, but rather delivering products that fit the clients needs. If a solution already exists that fits their needs, use it.

Oh and as far as rates, search this forum. Personally, I think that anyone with a year + of experience and over 15 sites under their belt shouldn't charge any less than $30 / hour (in the US).

[jgallen23]

this shopping cart is specific to one client, originally I was going to use a shopping cart from hotscripts, but he has some crazy needs because he his doing a lot of wholesale stuff with weird pricing and it would be more pain then it's worth to try and figure out somebody else's code to change a bunch of things

[raf]

i don't know what sort of quote we can give you without seeing the application, without knowing what sort of arangement you made with your client, without knowing if you plan on reusing/commercialising your application etc.

if i were your client, i'd be only intrested in the endresult, and if you could get it in one day by customizing a proven $50 app, than this would be worth more to me then if you coded it from scratch the last few weeks.

even if he has special request, writing a shoppingcart from scratch will probably never be the best sollution. In the worst case, you just use the modules/parts to do the userinteraction, and write your own pricingmodule or whatever

[jgallen23]

can anybody recommend me a good shopping cart that will be easy for me to alter code. It doesn't have to be very detailed and everything doesn't have to be dynamic. I was originally going to try oscommerce, but it turned out to be almost too dynamic and too difficult to implement the needs of my client

[Nightfire]

oscommerce is one of the easiest shoppingcarts to modify :confused: