Setting up an on-line shop - time required?

Tav

Hi all,

Could anyone share their experience with setting up an on-line shop? What time did it take to get from finding a web developer to go live?
Did you come across some totally unexpected problems? What to look out for during the setting up process?

Any advice welcome!

punkle

It depends what size of business it is for but there are a number of out of the box webshops aimed at smaller businesses. They are relatively easy to setup. Just a case of entering products, costs etc. Customization of the interface is more difficult with this option but can be a lot cheaper than getting a developer.

Tav

I'm taking the route of getting a developer because I want to have this done properly.

Skadi

A friend of mine found that when they went to talk to companies about having an online shop that many of these companies dismissed the little extras that they wanted like custom navigation. A good content management system and also the ability to add products with specific information. Also it was important to them to have the search to look exactly as they wanted.

Prices varied and many proposals simply disregarded items talking about when they met the company or told them that their customisations were not very cost effective.

Remember a good online system is not just about the customer's experience, but also needs a good administration system so you can easily retrieve orders, update products and pull reports from the system.

You are probably better off to go with a web developer or some company that is willing to customise things for you. You are best to let them know your price range and try and get a feel for how well they know their system. Try and choose someone who is interested in how you want to do things rather than how they tell you to do it.

It should take no more than three months to get your site started and live. Do your own testing as soon as it is made available to you, because most companies only give you a small time (a month or so) in which they will fix things for free. Also support is important and ensure your finished system is easy to use so that you will not need to get support on how to do things within the system.

Beware of hidden things in the proposal such as
- are customisations charged per hour rather than a set price
- how much is support charged at
- who will host the site, and who arranges this
- what way are online payments going to be processed
- how much contact/information will you have with the company to when they are developing your project.

If they are using a standard product ask for a demo to see how easy and suitable it is for your needs.

heggie

from a web designers point of view, largely delays are down to the clients not having content ready. Make sure you have everything 100% ready to go when you approach someone to do it.

cmcsoft

I would agree it is very important to have an idea of what exactly what you want.

Have a look at sites on the market currently.

• What do you like / dislike from these sites.
• Have you a preferred colour scheme for the site.
• Also content is king, have you pics, product descriptions ready to go.

If you are dealing with a developer ensure that you agree a design first. In my experience, clients can sometimes come with an idea and when shown a design they say great but when the site is finished they want to change the whole thing because their friend thought it wasn't nice.

Be very careful of hidden costs, agree your price for all work and extras up front. It might be an idea to look at your budget and have an idea of the max you want to spend.

Another thing to watch out for is the marketing aspect of the project. You haven't mentioned it in your post. Some developers offer marketing as part of the project. If they do get a break down of the price for the marketing aspect individually.

Hope this helps. Best of Luck

Tav

Hi,
Thank you for all the tips!
It seems that an agreed price list is a very important issue here!


@heggie
On average, how long takes you to get the e-commerce website up and running (providing that the client have, let say, 80% of all content ready)?

Tony

Take a look at www.teclan.co.uk , its a company I have used several times

Dabko

Recently launched our online store using a joomla based cms engine. The whole project took just over 2 months, which wasnt bad considering its quite a large site/store - 330 products.

But as the other posters said here, have your content ready to go, this is generally what wastes the most time.

If you want to see our site, drop me a pm.

Bluefoam

I've been dabbling in CubeCart recently & it is easy enough to set up and run - particularly if you want to start small with little expense.

However I can't manage to change the appearance in Dreamweaver.

heggie

Tav, I would say on average about 2-3 months (this time of year will probably add to that a bit). It really depends a lot on the clients effort though, there's not much that can be done while waiting for design sign off for example.

Tav

@www.teclan.co.uk

Their portfolio seems to be nice!


@heggie
I will do my best to make designer's life easier


General question:
Who approaches the bank for merchant account (for on-line payments), is it me or the website developer? I've read it can take up to 1 month to set up! Any feedback on this?

egan007

Tav wrote: »

General question:
Who approaches the bank for merchant account (for on-line payments), is it me or the website developer? I've read it can take up to 1 month to set up! Any feedback on this?

You could take payments through a payment gateway like realex - paypal is propably one you know off but less professional.

With the sites I created, the ones that use gateways I do all the setup and the ones that use a mercant account, the customer sets up the account, I provide the payment collection mechanism i.e. Secure CC details collection.

Bluefoam

Tav wrote: »

Who approaches the bank for merchant account (for on-line payments), is it me or the website developer?

Think its you that needs to set up merchant account, but make sure it works with your developers payment method.

If you use paypal you can get payments direct to your credit card + its recognised so people have good faith in it.

sm.org

Bluefoam wrote: »

Think its you that needs to set up merchant account, but make sure it works with your developers payment method.

If you use paypal you can get payments direct to your credit card + its recognised so people have good faith in it.

Paypal as a company give me conflicting ideas on one hand they are well know, used by a lot of companies and customer friendly. On the other hand a few retailers I know and a few I've read on here think they're unprofessional, always side with the customer and are nightmare to get in contact with.

Anyone here had any personal dealings with them?

madmik

I have had extensive dealings with them over the last 5 years

They do not give a bollix about retailers as people are continually learning the hard way

I have often had chargebacks just taken out of my account with just a generic email about paypals policy

usually in this case the buyer gets to keep the iitem and a full refund


its infuriating when it happens but paypal wont even hear your side of the argument

in ireland we are disadvantaged because our registered postal service is more expensive than comparable services in the uk and the us

this means its damn near impossible to sell low priced hi volume items

an examplle is I used to have an ebay store which sold items for 6 euro

I was getting the items for 2.50 per piece,which left 3.50 profit which sounds like a healthy margin but its not

say ebay takes 50cent to list the item and paypal takes another 50cent to recieve the payment

an international stamp is 83 and an envelope and bubble wrap also cost say 15 cent for both

this leaves 1.50 odd profit for taking the time to souorce the items,advertise them,sell them,wrap them,ship them etc

at those kind of margins you just Cant afford being scammed by chancers
pulling paypal chargebacks etc

lose 1 item on a chargeback and that eats the profits from 6 sales
lose 2 items eats profit from 12 sales etc

also losing a paypal dispute looks bad on your ebay and paypal account ,it looks as if youre the conman because the dispute didnt go your way

Registered post costs 5.75minimum for to the uk

which makes it impossible for us to compete with uk sellers

I would avoid ebay + paypal completely if i had other options for all my transactions but unfortunnately they have no real competion yet

Tav

So far we can see plenty of quite bad opinions about paypal.

So how about other companies? Is there anyone that has a good experience with some other service provider?
Who would you recommend based on your dealings?

Trojan

Your mileage will vary, "it depends" is a cop-out answer, but it's very true.

For example I've added a working ecommerce facility to an existing site in only 4 hours. That was using Paypal for payments and 1ShoppingCart, and only had a small number of products.

On the other hand, if there's customisation, database entry, etc to be done you could be talking 1-3 months.

Trojan, is it fair to say that with a website that is made well and professional looking, has products competitively priced and has excellent ad words and traffic that the goods will sell?

Or is it difficult for online businesses to succeed and even with the perfect combination, sometimes you just won't succeed?

Tony

Re: Paypal I have had an absolute nightmare with them, cannot detail it as I may be taking legal action in the future

sm.org wrote: »

Anyone here had any personal dealings with them?

sm.org

Thanks for your replies. Sorry if I'm hijacking your thread OP but I think my questions are applicable to us both.

One more: Roughly how muck should I be forking out to web designer + graphic designer for a complete site. What we're planning is about a 3/4 page site, with online selling of 25 different items , probably no more then 2 payment systems. the graphic designer will be creating an "identity" for us and the web guy doing the rest.

I've gotten 2 quotes both in the 5/6 grand range for the combination of the 2. Is this the norm??

Sorry if my details are a bit basic, I'm not the most techno savvy.

Would like to know that also...

In my experience, for short term "projects" paypal will do. But for long term, no chance.

Tony

Why not start out with a software programme like actinic (which I use) . This has a number of templates built in and is a good way to test your site before shelling out big bucks on designers. You can download a free trial at www.actinic.co.uk

sm.org wrote: »

One more: Roughly how muck should I be forking out to web designer + graphic designer for a complete site. What we're planning is about a 3/4 page site, with online selling of 25 different items , probably no more then 2 payment systems. the graphic designer will be creating an "identity" for us and the web guy doing the rest.