[Coltan Solutions]

I have a possible job coming up for a friend who's father owns a warehouse. They want an e-commerce site to sell their goods online (electronics). They have about 30-50,000 products to sell online, and each product has been weighed (for shipping rates) and photographed.

What would be the best e-commerce solutions (payments though PayPal as well as the usual Visa, Maestro, etc...)?
How much would you charge (roughly) for a project of this size?

thanks,
Sunny

[2wowu]

By the hour probably, its an epic sized job which I would love to take on and know of an internet program (That I can use quite well) to do this quite quickly. The software has capabilities for just about any payment method and does everything automatically (As in sending emails once a product is bought, disables items when they go out of stock, builds the pages etc etc.)
What's your budget?
The ecommerce program is $30.00 per month or $500.00 to buy out right however if you buy it you stop recieving updates after 12 months.
I would be looking to charge £10/15 per hour, I could also get my colleague to help as each product is added automatically and you can have as many admin' on there as you like.
It may be better if you contact me via email as I don't check back here too often.
Adam@2wowu.com

Adam.

[Alliance Studio]

2wowu, on 04 March 2010 - 06:00 PM, said:

By the hour probably, its an epic sized job which I would love to take on and know of an internet program (That I can use quite well) to do this quite quickly. The software has capabilities for just about any payment method and does everything automatically (As in sending emails once a product is bought, disables items when they go out of stock, builds the pages etc etc.)
What's your budget?
The ecommerce program is $30.00 per month or $500.00 to buy out right however if you buy it you stop recieving updates after 12 months.
I would be looking to charge £10/15 per hour, I could also get my colleague to help as each product is added automatically and you can have as many admin' on there as you like.
It may be better if you contact me via email as I don't check back here too often.
Adam@2wowu.com

Adam.

Unless I've misunderstood, I don't think he is looking to hire anyone but instead wants advice on what sort of software package to use.

We have had experience with Interspire which accomodated one of our clients nicely however they only had around 3000 products to add. Interspire does support CSV uploads which is something I would definately recommend for a site with so many products as it will allow easy uploading/editing of products simultaneously.

Magento may also be a good choice as it has a huge range of features available but as a lot of people will explain, it does have a steep learning curve when designing for it.

[Coltan Solutions]

Alliance Studio, on 05 March 2010 - 12:15 AM, said:

Unless I've misunderstood, I don't think he is looking to hire anyone but instead wants advice on what sort of software package to use.

We have had experience with Interspire which accomodated one of our clients nicely however they only had around 3000 products to add. Interspire does support CSV uploads which is something I would definately recommend for a site with so many products as it will allow easy uploading/editing of products simultaneously.

Magento may also be a good choice as it has a huge range of features available but as a lot of people will explain, it does have a steep learning curve when designing for it.

Bang on! Not looking to hire someone, but after the best solution.
That sounds great, I will check it out, thanks mate

Btw, how much would you charge if this was a project a client approached you with?

[hosted web]

I would probably go for Cactushop, tried and tested with a million products (i believe). VERY easy to skin..Loads of features straight out of the box.

I would charge at least 5k, depends if they have a database with the products in that could be imported into the shopping cart. If not then 5k plus xx per hour for the time to add products.

[Coltan Solutions]

hosted web, on 05 March 2010 - 02:05 PM, said:

I would charge at least 5k, depends if they have a database with the products in that could be imported into the shopping cart. If not then 5k plus xx per hour for the time to add products.

My thoughts exactly. Just wanted to get your opinions.

Will look into the Cactushop now, thanks.

@Alliance Studio: I had a look at Interspire and I have to say I was really impressed with it. Looks great and the prices are justified by the software. Great piece of software!

Edit:
Unless I get any more suggestions, I guess it's going to be between these two then...

This post has been edited by Coltan Solutions: 05 March 2010 - 04:43 PM

[rallport]

Stay away from Cactus shop, last time I checked it's based on the old and very defunct classic ASP.

If people are charging you thousands of pounds and using pre-made software then they are frankly having a laugh.

Someone above mentioned 5k - for that amount you want a totally bespoke store at the very least.

If you have you products in an electroic format such as an Excel document you coiuld import these into your database easily. Most places will charge for this.

If you want that many products adding and you're not willing to do this yourself, you're likely to get charged by the hour - and this could rack up a fair bill.

EDIT: hjave used prestashop before too. Its PHP based and totally OOP, so easy to add your own classes if you need to.

[rallport]

2wowu, on 04 March 2010 - 06:00 PM, said:

By the hour probably, its an epic sized job which I would love to take on and know of an internet program (That I can use quite well) to do this quite quickly. The software has capabilities for just about any payment method and does everything automatically (As in sending emails once a product is bought, disables items when they go out of stock, builds the pages etc etc.)
What's your budget?
The ecommerce program is $30.00 per month or $500.00 to buy out right however if you buy it you stop recieving updates after 12 months.
I would be looking to charge £10/15 per hour, I could also get my colleague to help as each product is added automatically and you can have as many admin' on there as you like.
It may be better if you contact me via email as I don't check back here too often.
Adam@2wowu.com

Adam.

For the amount of products he's adding scability and how well written the code is will definately make a huge difference. For small stores you can get away with badly written code, but on a larger store like the OPs things like what database, how the tables are setup, how hes accesing the database via say PHP will all come into question.

For $30 per month of $500 in total, I don't imagine he's getting a lot for his money. For the monthly option I also imagine the store is hosted on your servers too, which isn't exactly ideal for a large store like his.

Not meaning to sound harsh here, but if the ecommerce store your offering is anything like your website - which fails on lots of very basic levels (E.g. image compression) - then he should stay well away.

If the OP has up to 50k products, choosing an ecommerce platform isn't a choice that should be taken lightly.