Potential Client for my web design business

she only has 4 products

Use Magento for e-com. 99% of the people here will tell you to just use wordpress, as a developer I suggest using a real e-com solution and not a "blog" cms.

Edit: only 4 products? That is more of a kiosk then a store front.

EDIT: I think you need to increase your budget. $200 for an ecommerce site is extremely low.

Her budget is 200 bucks.

To be honest, this is stuff you should have already thought about before ever engaging a potential client. You should already know what your own rates are. If you don't know the going rate for this type of work, you need to learn more about it before getting involved.

This is the stuff that gives the term "SEO" a negative connotation.

$200? Dude, a certificate can cost $200 alone. If she is going to be processing payments on the site, you are going to need SSL. What are you going to charge for maintenance of the site or will the client be doing that? If the client, are you goign to provide training?

If you opt for a non-SSL solution and use an offsite checkout via a plugin, what are the client's options when the plugin is no longer supported?

So many questions....

While $200 is extremely low for anything e-commerce. Some must have plugins for most e-commerce solutions, will easily cost you a a few hundred dollar alone. So $200 will be very hard if you seek for high quality.

I just want to suggest opencart for this.

Don't use mangento for a $200 webshop. You need a server for it to even run it smoothly.

You can get ezcart free at hosting companys, i'm not naming names. I'd charge about $100 an hour and be honest as to how long it takes you to set it up. Even better, if you believe in the products, do it for free and ask for a percentage of each sell. Then you're cooking!

You can get a Wordpress Ecommerce site from Woo Themes, but as everyone has said ... good luck getting one done and making a profit with a $200 budget.

$200 dollars is poor mans rates.

I hate when our sales people get the whole "oh, yes, thats great but I only need one page websites done for $200"

That is why we door knock on high paying clients now. Go to those that have the money and are already advertising and you will be surprised what they will pay. Then you outsource the work and end up with 3 - 5k profits on most occasions. Do not go to the small bread clients as they will give you bread crumbs.

I would charge $5,000 and offer her a full suite of services that includes web design.

Use magento. Really powerful for ecommerce websites.
And please, not $200. Tooo loow for this project. $3000 - $5000 would be awesome.

I think I'm going to pass on this opportunity...thanks guys. I don't think she has that kind of money.

Bill,

This might help you do what you're looking to do and stay within the $200 budget. Top 5 Excellent E-Commerce Plugins for WordPress
The payment processing might be the hard part.

Hope this helps,

Jim Waller

OK. $200 is peanuts. No argument there.

But those peanuts can pay for something in your business... gas, other bills?

And the thing is, you can get that money without breaking your back.

Bill, PM me if you want a link to a good solution to this dilemma. I'm not selling anything and not affiliated. But seems to me there is too much negativity out here for me to share a resource that probably people don't care for.

It works like magento but is easier to set up, and cheaper, and will take you mere minutes once you have all the details for your prospect's 4 products. It's not world class, like magento, but is definitely the kind of solution someone with just $200 should appreciate, some nice bells and whistles thrown in free of charge too.

If you can get paid $200 to work for one hour (or less if you can handle getting the deal, getting the content and building the site really quickly) and you turn that down, you probably don't need any tips.

Otherwise, this resource is definitely worth the $200 in peanuts... eh gas money

Others who want to know can also PM.

Cheers,

Kunle

Pass her over to me

I assume the 4 products she is selling is like her own bulk of purchases right? I dropship my products so maybe that's something she needs to consider. $200 is very cheap, however make it a quick project a week or so and basically, state that your happy to do it, but you only get what you pay for etc...


My company paid around $5,000 for their own platform, but we are going to merge into Magento in the next coming months.

Anyone that thinks a client with a $200 budget will pay $5k for a site selling just 4 items is living in cloud cuckoo land!

Why not use Paypal? I could, would and do design simple one to three page sites for clients that fall within that budget. Adding 4 Paypal buttons and a short description of each product is the work of less than an hour.

Use meganta , and it works

Some good points, I agree mostly with 'Big Mike'.

Over the years doing web design you start to build a 'template' for doing these cheap jobs and you also build a special contract to go with them.

Using WP, a free cart and integrating with PayPal for checkout (so you don't need an SSL), and having the client provide you with all the content, logo, product descriptions etc upfront (ALONG WITH PAYMENT UPFRONT)....you should be able to get this off your desk in around 2-3 hours using one of the many templates you have in your portfolio.

Now when they come back and ask for this and that to be changed, refer them to your contract and bill them at your hourly rate, they won't pay it but you won't feel obligated to do it for free either.

So you've added $200 to your annual turnover and you've worked at the rate of perhaps $60 / hr, which isn't a bad rate for designers these days.

OR.....use the same contract then outsource it on Elance and make a quick $50. Yes, there are people on Elance who will do this for $150

Now what I think John Romaine is inferring is that in general, it harms the industry for people to take on these jobs and let the client get away with only paying a couple hundred bucks for a project which is worth 3-4 times that.

I agree with him, but unfortunately the damage has already been done via globalization and outsourcing. Play the game or don't, you always have that choice.

I agree with one point of "wolfmmiii", that you should know how much you are willing to charge for this type of job.

However, I don't think $200 for this type of job should be out of the question.

It just depends on:
1) How easily/quickly you can get this set up.
2) How badly you need that $200.

We don't know the OP's financial income stream, so we can't tell that person to just pass on the opportunity.

If you think you can get this project done using a collection of ready-made Plugins and instant Set-up websites like WordPress, in 1 day, then I say go for it!

90%+ of the people on these forums aren't making $200 daily from online work, so we shouldn't down-talk the OP/Client saying that the money is too small, and that the Client should be charged $5000, etc...

The Client may also be uninformed of the normal prices of projects like this.

In today's world, so many things are automated, including setting up websites, e-commerce, etc...
Just take advantage of that, and get paid well for the little time you spent on the project.

$200 is too low price even though if you predict for the same project as low as then web design +60$, programming +200$, SSL certificate +35$, Maintenance +50. I think for this project your budget should have at least 350$