How much to charge to web design a Ecommerce Site?

Question

I know it's hard question answer and I know everyone says it depends.

Im a freelance web designer and I have built Commercial sites in the past but never a Ecommerce site before.

It is a small gift shop that wants a shopping cart and be able to accept credit cards. Should I give a flat fee for x amount of items to put on the site. Or should I charge per item.
They said there is around 100 - 200 items

I would have to:
-Take a photo of the item
-crop the picture
-upload the picture and put in on the site.
-create the add to shopping cart button for the item

How would I deal with upkeep with the site should I charge for a service contract for 6, 12 months?

How much should I charge for all this. Nothing crazy just html and the shopping cart.

Answer 1

Use OSCommerce and you have a huge head start on the problem.

http://www.oscommerce.org

Also, ZenCart:

http://www.zencart.com

Answer 2

As far as I know, it's perfectly legal for them to charge you hosting fees now. Even though the site is not yet functional, it is still taking up server space. If you're building an office building, you pay for the land even before the building is finished. This is the same kind of thing. The hosting costs should not be expensive. A Linux-based hosting service with 60MB of database and 200MB of storage should cost you less than $10.00 a month. These are probably sufficient for a medium-sized business. It's possible to build a site off-line and then transfer the entire thing over to avoid these early hosting fees. I actually build a working prototype on a free site for my clients before I charge them anything, and then I transfer the site to a paid account as part of the site launch process. If they don't purchase the site, I simply deactivate the free account. It sounds like it's far too early to be worried about particular items in your catalog. The focus now should be on getting the data framework to do what it's supposed to do. The second priority would probably be the visual framework (making it look right.) Once you've got those things under control, it's time to worry about actual data. Are they building your site from scratch, or putting it on top of a CMS or e-commerce system? This decision has a major effect on the workflow, and understanding this could help you determine what's going on.

Answer 3

How do you normally charge? By the hour or by the job?

Let me tell you, I run a small web hosting company (www.cohenwebsvc.com, yes I'll shamelessly plug myself, and yes, my own website is no way near as good as my customers' sites) and it is these "little jobs" that are my biggest problem. For example, I have one customer (pays a flat fee for HOSTING) who always wants me to modify his site -- even after I built pages so that he can modify it himself (I can't dump him, he is both a friend and one of my first customers).

My worry is that you will not charge enough for all of the work you are going to have to do. Setting up the items and taking the pictures is going to take 10-30 minutes each -- and that assumes that the customer has all of the items ready for you to photograph. How long it takes to crop will be a function of how good you are with your toolset.

Suggestion? don't create a button for each item. Rather, use an off the shelf e-commerce product (there are several that are free) or use a database and php or perl to dynamically create the page and the button. This way, you create the pages once. You only have to add/remove records from your db as your customer adds/removes things.

For charging: I would have a fixed fee for the pages and database. Then a per-piece charge for the photos. Good luck

Answer 4

I can help you generate revenue form this account on a monthly basis through the credit card acceptance side of the service. We have partnered with many web designers and ecommerce providers to help them find revenue through the credit card processing volume from the merchant and shopping cart costs.

Email me for more info: [e-mail]