Cost to Build a Fastlane Website

[Forza]

What would be a ballpark figure to have a website + shopping cart made for a single cosmetic product? I'm not going to do it myself, I want a website designed and built to compete so I can get out of the starting gates at full speed, so to speak.

 

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[valuegiver]

If you do it alone, it is around 100 bucks with a domain name, a VPS, and OSCommerce (or variants). If you have others to build it for you (and do hell of a good job), it's going to be at least 5000 USD.

 

[Russ H]

If you have others to build it for you (and do hell of a good job), it's going to be at least 5000 USD.

For a SINGLE product?

Wow, Mtnman, you listening?

Biophase?

Other web dudes and dudettes?

Care to chime in here?

-Russ H.

 

[Flatlander]

I think you could certainly get it done for a lot less than $5000. If you just have one product and need a simple site (and simple sites usually work best) then a few hundred bucks should be enough. This is a one day job, a few days at most. Ask your friends and family, maybe they know someone local to your or maybe even try a Craig's List ad and see what happens. Before you hire anyone, BE SURE TO LOOK AT THEIR PORTFOLIO FIRST AND DO ***NOT*** PAY FOR THE WHOLE JOB UP FRONT. HALF DOWN AND HALF WHEN IT IS DONE IS A BETTER WAY TO GO. Sorry for the yelling but web designers are a flakey bunch and the OP is dipping his toes in sometimes treacherous waters.

 

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[valuegiver]

A single e-commerce website with many products. I am not joking.

For a SINGLE product?

Wow, Mtnman, you listening?

Biophase?

Other web dudes and dudettes?

Care to chime in here?

-Russ H.

 

[Russ H]

A single e-commerce website with many products. I am not joking.

Oh, I didn't think you were joking.

There was a gal here a year ago named Jackie that was supposedly loaning money all day long for real estate-- and doing it at 14-18%. She claimed that this was "the going rate" for RE loans.

Thing is, there were so many experienced RE investors here that were getting loans right then for 4-7%, that we kinda had a hard time believing her.

She wasn't joking, either. She was just living in a different world compared to the others here.

I guess that's my point, too: Lots of folks on these forums doing single-- or even multiple-- product sites w/great SEO and good monthly business.

And they get them built for a LOT less than that.

Perhaps in your eyes their sites are not "a hell of a good job".

But they are more interested in their bottom lines.

Spending $5K for a website means you have to sell a LOT more widgets to break even.

I'm not suggesting being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

But you need to factor in both sides of the equation when doing online commerce:

Both money in, and money out.

BTW, I'm no expert at these things-- there are others here who are have a LOT more experience w/these sites.

I'm hoping they'll put their 2¢ in, for balance.

-Russ H.

 

[biophase]

There are alot of free carts out there like OScommerce, but they take alot of time setup properly. Unless you are really really low on funds, buy a professional shopping cart.

You can get a decent shopping cart for about $250-$300. If you are decent with html and php you can easily modify it yourself. If not, you can probably find someone to customize it visually for $500-$1000. There's really no need to go the custom built route and spend more. Realistically, if you knew nothing and went with a hosted system you will spend about $300 up front (domain, SSL, payment processor) and $30-$50/mo on a hosted site. You should be good for up to 100 products maybe even 500.

If you only have one product, there is really no need for an actual as there is only one item to add into it. You can go with a paypal buy now button on a single page site.

 

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[mtnman]

What Bio said is true, but it's incredibly common for people not to have any skill or resources.

These are the folks that need to spend that much to be up and running... they don't know where to look, what to look for, etc...

So yeah, 5k is cheap in some instances.

To put it in a different perspective, do you know how much of a pain in the a$$ it is to do client work for an ecommerce development (where the client has no prior experience)?

If you're not following a strict process, a simple client change request in their data set can be HOURS of work. "oh but we gave you the wrong sku for this category." Erm, 5k surpassed.

For single product stuff and no experience, one could use a simple service like Shopify. Getting educated and covering the many other routes you could take to build out ecommerce would be like 100's of posts... too many ways to skin a cat.

 

[skyhigh]

There are so many open source shopping carts available for you to use. The populars ones are: osCommerce, Magento, CubeCart, ZenCart, etc. You can do it your self since you are selling only one single product, but if you don't want to learn (Process) then i guess you can pay some one to do it and it will cost you less then $500 to set it up and with designs. I would suggest you to start with shared hosting first to see if people buys your stuff, then you can switch to VPS($28 a month). For payment, you can use Paypal. For SSL, use Godaddy since most people know Godaddy and they will feel secure compares to some free SSL.

Costs:

Domain name: $10 or less a year

Shared Hosting: $5 to $6 a month

E-Commerce site: $500 to $800 include designs, logo, setting up the e-commerce, setting up the server, SEO, etc.

If it's your own product, then you might want to establish a company, trademark, filing for sales tax, etc..

 

[skyhigh]

What Bio said is true, but it's incredibly common for people not to have any skill or resources.

These are the folks that need to spend that much to be up and running... they don't know where to look, what to look for, etc...

So yeah, 5k is cheap in some instances.

To put it in a different perspective, do you know how much of a pain in the a$$ it is to do client work for an ecommerce development (where the client has no prior experience)?

If you're not following a strict process, a simple client change request in their data set can be HOURS of work. "oh but we gave you the wrong sku for this category." Erm, 5k surpassed.

For single product stuff and no experience, one could use a simple service like Shopify. Getting educated and covering the many other routes you could take to build out ecommerce would be like 100's of posts... too many ways to skin a cat.

There are no words that can describe the pain. Educating them about the whole e-commerce thing takes more time than to develop the site itself. Sometimes, all they want is to copy other website and said to you" Here's 1k, i want the same site as this one"

 

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[Icy]

Shared Hosting: $5 to $6 a month

E-Commerce site: $500 to $800 include designs, logo, setting up the e-commerce, setting up the server, SEO, etc.

Eh, if you go shared hosting route you still need one with a dedicated IP for SSL which will cost a bit more.

 

[skyhigh]

Oh yea, thats true, i forgot about that.

 

[drmctcher]

I Love Mixergy , and thought of this interview when I read your thread. Listen in and you might get some direction.

DODOcase: How An iPad Case Generated Almost $1 Mil In Revenue Within 3 Months – with Patrick Buckley | Case Studies & Business Tips

Best of luck !

 

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[biophase]

Eh, if you go shared hosting route you still need one with a dedicated IP for SSL which will cost a bit more.

For beginners, they can go with a hosted site like Volusion and just use the company's SSL for checkout if they wanted to be cheap.

Going totally, barebones absolute el cheapo and still get actual sales, you can get a hosted cart for $25/mo that uses paypal, google checkout and use a stock template. I've seen many sites doing very well on stock templates, BTW.

 

[Brootal]

I have never personally used them, but have heard great things about the shopify platform and they don't look terribly expensive either.

For a site only selling one product, I would hate to see someone spend a small fortune that could be better used elsewhere along the way.

Best of luck.

 

[cobwab]

oDesk.

Outsource it.

 

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[LightHouse]

Guys we are talking ONE product here. Not only will a shopping cart be a pain to set up and learn for a single product, but it will be a maintenance nightmare. For the same 300 you are buying into a shopping cart you could buy/or have someone code a simple checkout page for the product if you do not want to use a paypal/gorg checkout button.

Case in point, look at any of the infomercial products landing pages. it is a fairly static site, a buy button and a streamlined integrated checkout page which would be simple to create and maintain. Throw a couple hundred into it and get rolling. Just make sure you are not storing credit card numbers and your pages are secure not just by SSL, but from sql injection and remote file inclusion. A lot of the open source shopping cart softwares are openly vulnerable to these currently as well if left untouched.

 

[John Rogers]

If you do it alone, it is around 100 bucks with a domain name, a VPS, and OSCommerce (or variants). If you have others to build it for you (and do hell of a good job), it's going to be at least 5000 USD.

For a single product you can easily outsource it for 1/10th of that and have a damn nice site. $5,000 is insane! You might be able to get Don Lapre to do it for that.

 

[cobwab]

Get a paypal business account! They will handle all the processing. They are your shopping cart. You can get Javascript "Buy Now" buttons from paypal.

 

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[maximus20895]

I think the $5,000 number is talking about someone building a CMS or a shopping cart completely from scratch. This would include coding, database management, images, templates etc.

Honestly, there are plenty of free shopping carts out there that let you customize them a great deal. I think for your purpose it would be better to do that.