Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Ecommerce Hosting & Discussion : e-commerce solution cost

[tbnguyen]

I run an IT business that encompasses web development and hosting. As far as I have done web development including the uses of shopping carts software, I always charge my customers a per hour rate for all solutions. I now want to break it down a little and see what the standard cost of a shopping cart solution should be. When I checked the Internet, there is really no true standard. Some sell the carts and then requests the buyers who need help to submit a request for quote. I know each provider does things differently.

Here is one of my estimates for a small project I did last year. Could you tell me what you would have charged for the solution?

Web site about 5-7 pages, incorporated with a shopping cart to connect to a Merchant account using ASP running on Windows Server (also connects to PayPal), approximately 50 items to sell, certificate for SSL through Verisign, order tracking and some other features. I basically used StoreFront 6.0 to build the cart solution.

My charge for them was $2,600. What would have been your charge?

If you think that you don't want to post up prices of your solution for the above sample, you can PM me instead. I am truly trying to find a bracket that makes me competitive and not out to oversell or undersell anyone. ANd if your prices are dirt cheap, I may have to talk to you further in contracting you to do e-commerce solutions.

Regards.

[Corey Bryant]

It depends on the shopping cart. We usually customize the carts - made from scratch. But a basic cart (ASP/MS Access) with inventory control, categories, order tracking, sub-categories, sizes/colors, UPS/USPS/Fed-Ex API, LinkPoint API or LinkPoint basic or our other gateway, would be about $600. Depending on what they choose - they might not need to security cert at that time.

We just did one cart that had multiple owners who owned categories (like a bazaar). Since that cart was more elaborate, ASP was $1500 & .NET/MSSQL was $2250.

Maintenance / hosting at about $22.00. of course if they need a SSL - that would be about $175 more(?).

[bradshaw]

Dose not really matter how many products they sell, you still have to do the same work if its 1 or 10000 products,, you can ask them to upload all the images & info to save costs. but i would suggest $5000 is a good ball part figure, with hosting and everything included, that’s how much I charge anyway. If you think that is a lot, a rival local company just finished a video dvd stores site for $25,000 which was down from $55,000 because they scanned in the images of the dvds and wrote the descriptions in hours. If its going to be of real value to the business, increase profits, and be something they are proud of then they will pay good money for it. Do not ever ever under sell your services. Always charge the right amount, you have over heads yourself, rent, equipment, electricity, employee wages, ect.. ect…