Pricing Ecommerce Web Design Projects
I would like an e-commerce site just like someothershop.com – how much would that cost me?
It’s a common enough question, and one that always leads your average freelance web designer to take a deep breath and sigh ‘Well, let me see …’. There are many factors that influence the cost of an ecommerce web project, but when you communicate the vagaries to clients, there tend to be three that can have a huge impact – and are often only dealt with summarily: products, postage and payments.
1. Products
Obviously enough, both the nature of the products your client sells and the number of them will impact the amount of your time spent in development.
If they’re selling a widget that comes in one size, one color and you can only buy one of them… well, straightforward enough. However, most people aren’t selling such simple items. Products with multiple options (sizes, colors, etc.) will likely be more complex to set up. Similarly, products with a number of associated images might need to be handled differently.
Urge your client to take the time up front to properly organize their product database.
Then, the sheer number of products comes in to play. There’s not much technically different about an ecommerce site handling 100 products to one handling 10,000 products – they all need to be treated in the same way (searched for, displayed, added to a cart), but it can have a huge impact on the development time. If you’ve got 5,000 products each with 3 images, 2 paragraphs of text and a couple of options, well that’s going to take longer to configure than might otherwise be the case.
Urge your client to take the time up front to properly organize their product database. Create an excel template for them containing all the information you’re going to need from them on each product. They’ll need a column for any unique identifying codes, a column for image file names, a column for price, one for description, one for shipping cost (more on which in a moment), and so on.
If, at the time of generating your proposal, the client cannot send you a sample of their data or confirm that they have all their materials ready to go, then you’re going to need to factor that into your proposal. Get your client organizing themselves early – it’ll save you a ton of time later on.
2. Postage
Postage is such an overlooked aspect of pricing ecommerce websites. Often, it’s going to relate to the platform you’re developing with – off the shelf ecommerce packages will have their own predefined methods impacting how you can charge postage for orders. Magento, for instance, has a variety of options – flat rate, table rates, courier pricing, etc. Trading Eye offers postage estimates, postage by weight, free postage, fixed rate… and so forth.
These can be customized, but at what cost? If your client needs something unusual, be sure to factor in the cost of developing a new module/method for the platform you’re developing with. I recently worked on a project for an online florist where we had to factor in the driving distance (not straight line distance, driving distance) and local fuel prices in determining final delivery costs.
A thorough understanding of how the client is going to want to charge for delivery will impact whether you’re proposing an off the shelf solution or if you’re going to develop a bespoke ecommerce project for them – with obvious cost implications.
3. Payments
In order to take money online your client needs a means of securely processing a credit card. That usually means one of two things: taking money with a 3rd party payment provider, or using a standalone system like PayPal. Each have their advantages.
With a third party payment provider your client provides a seamless shopping experience for customers. It’s a good way of doing things if you’re after that integrated experience. But it will likely cost more of your time. Working with the payment gateway’s API may be new to you and if your client’s bank requires PCI compliance then be prepared to add in a number of developer hours in getting the site and hosting set up correctly.
PCI compliance is becoming increasingly necessary – but not any easier to get right. Using an off the shelf shopping cart system can help – securing URL’s and other holes so that you don’t have to worry about them. But your own code is going to be used to integrate the payment provider – so you’ll need to be on top of the latest security concerns. You’ll need to be more discerning when choosing a hosting plan too – typically either a dedicated box or dedicated virtual server will give you the level of server access you will require.
Using a standalone system removes a lot of that complication. PayPal, for instance, will handle all of the payment security concerns. As a developer, you never come close to a credit card number and since the transaction is processed entirely off of your site, you’ve no worries over SSL certificates or hosting requirements. It’ll take you much less time to set up for your client, and cost them less as a result. But although consumer trust for services like PayPal has increased over the last few years, at the end of the day, it’s nice to complete the whole transaction on the one website. PayPal’s not for everyone.
Summary
All ecommerce sites serve the same basic function: display products, have a shopping cart, allow checkout, and allow the client to make changes themselves. But not all ecommerce projects are created equally. In my experience, these three factors can have a significant bearing on final cost – and discussing them up front with your client will help establish with them how complex their project is, hopefully leading them to a better understanding of your cost.
What are your experiences? Any instances where one particular factor wasn’t considered and ended up costing you or the client more than anticipated? Please share.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by NexusPlexus.
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I would add another one to the list:
4. interfaces / gateways
There are plenty of them and each has its own API / requirements: If it’s an interface to a CRM, ERP, ordering system, data warehouse, payment processor, SEO tool, carrier – the list goes on forever.
Be sure to get to know exactly what the clients need – make a map of the whole data flow, outline the fulfilment process with the client.
Carsten
Yes, that’s true. Any time you have to connect to an external service, you’re going to be adding development time for sure. Thanks, Carsten.
I have recently started out a project for a e-commerce site. My clients are totally confused about their product database.
… I feel your pain Hillary. Start them out with a really simple excel spreadsheet … product name, product description, price. Build it up from there … and try and remain patient with them!
Excellent Article. Truly said costing has prominent effect as far as the ecommerce sites are concerned. As you said all ecommerce sites serve the same basic functions but i think all ecommerce site owners need to think beyond this and take costing highly in to account. The points that you noted here are definitely fill the gap of having perfect ecommerce site. Thanks for sharing this.
Yes, there are so many factors that are needed when quoting a ecommerce website, and you dont want to run the risk of sell yourself short and end up doing double work for a small budget…
A good friend asked me to set up an eComm site for him. Not exactly sure how to price the project (since he is a very close friend), I agreed to set up the site for a minimal amount up front and I get a cut of the profits of his online sales.
I showed him Shopify and Wix and he was pleased with the template options from each. I played with both sites, settled on one, and built.
While the initial payment I received didn’t cover my time, the monthly checks for products sold (I receive 10% of online sales) have been nice. Using Shopify, I can keep tabs of the online sales and know what kind of compensation I can expect.
Ah – the ol’ slice of the revenue trick. It’s a good one when it works … and it’s the gift that keeps on giving! It’s good to remain incentivised too – you could probably push them some email marketing campaigns (that they’d pay for) and would really boost sales – and your income.
Thanks for sharing some of the cool tips here, pricing of ecommerce web design and development really needs to consider.
It’s been my experience that the smaller the client’s project sounds, the trickier it will be. As you say though David, keeping them informed is the key to a successful project completion. Very good article.
Yes – there’s a similar rule of thumb that goes ‘the smaller the budget, the higher maintenance the client’! Good communication from start to finish can negate an awful lot of problems though.
Every aspect of evert part of the job should be discusses as thoroughly as possible, and long before any actual work begins. I have begun designing and constructing a web site for a client for a certain estimated cost, but later they wanted to add more functionality to the site. This obviously would cost them more, but they believed it would be included. These types of misunderstandings can cause your clients to not trust you, or even go elsewhere.
Lucky for me, I had already discussed with my client that additional work would cost extra and this was considered additional work, not included in the original estimates.
Clear communication regarding pricing and what they get for their money should not be avoided.
I like your post very much and it is very interesting. The information about Web Development is very useful for the developers to develop the web applications. Thanks for share this valuable post.
Thanks for the info; it’s really helpful!
I have a client that has about 1400 products and wants me to setup a B2B eCommerce site, but one that can be viewed by the public, but without prices until they are given login details.
They want to be able to export the products for their ERP software into Excel and then into the Magento (which is what I want to use for the site) so that they don’t need me to do it for them as, of course it will cost them more. And they don’t want to integrate their ERP with the site for security reasons (which in this part of the world actually makes a bit of sense) but they are not sure yet.
They don’t need a payment system as we don’t have a local one and most of the foreign ones our country is banned from; also the banks here that do give VISA international or Mastercards charge ridiculous fees such as a flat-rate of US$3.50 for every transaction such as withdrawing money from their own ATM or online on any store for instance.
They don’t need integration with any shipping service either.
I am not sure how to bill them as it’s a lot different to most eCommerce sites that I’ve seen or articles I read about.
As you’ve said that your 3 factors and Carsten’s suggested 4th significantly impact the cost of the site, how much does it affect the cost of the site if it’s the opposite?
After having developed around 30 e-commerce websites I have found one key – scope everything. Detail the flow, customer account areas, checkout and cart, home page and any additional content (e.g. maybe they have a blog and video content as well) in addition to the above.
In addition always ask if there are any third party integrations – erp/crm, accounting, tax, etc.
Great article. I didn’t consider providing the client with a spreadsheet populate with their product data. Great idea. Thanks.