Question about the cost of a e-commerce site?

[littlenicky]

I have a business offline. I want to begin expanding it by putting a website up. The only thing is, I'm not too savvy with the website pricing. The site will need a shopping cart built around it with a full design. I'd like to have it customized a bit so there might be a little complex programming thrown in. The site focuses on about 5 products we offer. People will have to upload their piece. We then provide the service and send the completed product to them. Does anyone know what I will have to expect to pay for this website to be made?

[Andrew Thomas]

It would depend on how complex your site is? your customizations may increase the price - depending on how complicated they were. I have just started developing ecommerce sites and prices really depend on the features your are after, including backend admin features.

Plus you will have the price of the initial design (the look and feel), maintenance, hosting etc...

its best to shop around for a few quotes

(just noticed, welcome to webmasterworld)

[TallTroll]

As mentioned, pricing is going to be very dependent on far too many variables for anyone to give you a definitive "It should cost £****" type answer

However, depending on what shopping cart soultion is used, and how much back-end functionality you want / need, I would expect to pay at least £5000 for a good job.

Obviously, you could invest some of your own time in learning some programming yourself, then use an open source ecomm solution, and customise it to your exact requirements. Mnay of the major open source solutions have very active developer communities where you can get a lot of help, or perhaps recruit programming talent if you want that level of service

Waht you absolutely must NOT do is skimp on the budget. It will be far cheaper for you in the long run if you build the ecommerce element to be rich in functionality, scalable and search engine friendly from day 1. That will save you a lot in rewrite and migration costs a while down the line when you need serious upgrades...

[littlenicky]

Thank you for the advice... I'd like to have almost all the admin controls and hopefully have the ability to control what the users see depending on the type of customer they are. I'm leaning towards using OScommerce because its a free shopping cart. I already have the hosting part taken care of. Can anyone give me a range which I should be looking at? Would $3000 USD be a median or should I look at spending more? I guess I need to do a little more research.

[KS_Katz]

I've known basic e-commerce solutions that are less than $3,000. Would it offer the same functionality as a $10,000 site? Probably not. Like the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

I would suggest doing more homework. Figure out what functionality you want in the admin controls, how many products you want in the catalog, whether you want search engine friendly urls, etc.

Once you figure out what you want. Get quotes from multiple programmers. (Check out programmers from e-commerce sites that you admire.)

[danieljean]

I'll have to respectfully disagree with KS_Katz- you don't always get what you pay for. It may be true as far as the number of features go, but more features don't correlate well with increased sales.

USD$3,000 for a 5 product site? It could work, even though I would probably quote you more. That said, it depends on what you want.

When you get quotes, I recommend you look at their previous work with one question in mind: "Will this lead to sales?"

If you were buying this item, would the description be useful? Could you find what you were looking for? Was checkout easy? Most site buyers don't seem to care about this, and the lowest bidders often don't have time or desire to test and refine designs. Usability should not be an afterthought- if people can't figure out how to buy, your site is useless.

Other considerations that non-technical persons should consider:
-Will the pages render well on different browsers, including the new generation (Mozilla, Safari...)
-How long will a page take to load?
-What will maintenance costs be?

Database choice is also important. You might regret a solution that ties you to a database that is not standards-compliant, such as MySQL. Some (MS-SQL, Oracle) require licenses. I'd recommend Postgres because it is more standards-compliant, free and with powerful features missing from MySQL- features that come in handy for reporting queries.

I'm not sure this really answers your question, though hopefully you'll have more specific requests for quotes. Good luck! :)