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Anyone with Ecommerce expirience, help me price this job

by stone2010
10 replies
Hi everyone, I recently spoke to a potential customer who is interested on creating a big ecommerce site, around 15k products and also wants to do SEO pretty much for every item. I have never done such a big project like this and I am having a hard time coming up with a price. I usually work with lawyers, dentists, roofers etc and have no problem pricing my SEO and web design services with small businesses but this is a huge project. If anyone of you have experience with big ecommerce sites please let me know because i might be looking for someone to help me with this project. The SEO part I can do no problem but I am not too familiar with ecommerce softwares, small stores yes but not something this big.

Contact me with some information or if anyone can post here on how i should charge and where i can find someone that can help me with this. I want to give this customer a quote ASAP. Thanks guys!
#ecommerce #expirience #job #price
  • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
    Find someone that can develop using magento.

    These products... are they in a product feed, like a dealer feed.. or a .csv or what? If it is manual upload, we usually charge $15,000-25,000 for a BIG ecommerce site. 15K products, you don't want to go under that.

    Welcome to the big time... if you use wordpress for this your client will hate you.
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  • Profile picture of the author stone2010
    Thank you for the response, wordpress didnt even come to mind with such a big project like this. I was thinking more like Magento, 3DCart, Bigcommerce and other ecommerce softwares. Ideally will be to find someone that can help me with this and outsource most of it.

    I can find out how to products are, they already have a running website so they want to build another one with pretty much the same items and use that one more for SEO reasons. How about for SEO how much you think this would go for? monthly
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    • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
      Originally Posted by stone2010 View Post

      Thank you for the response, wordpress didnt even come to mind with such a big project like this. I was thinking more like Magento, 3DCart, Bigcommerce and other ecommerce softwares. Ideally will be to find someone that can help me with this and outsource most of it.

      I can find out how to products are, they already have a running website so they want to build another one with pretty much the same items and use that one more for SEO reasons. How about for SEO how much you think this would go for? monthly
      Bigcommerce is cool, but I would be wary on using anything other than magento for this. 3DCart is not an option I think should even consider.

      SEO is a little different. For a lot of the products you would probably want to focus on just optimizing, title, metas, all that...After that is complete then focus on a few categories.

      This is potentially a pretty big project for you... you could make a lot of money on this. If you want to have a higher margin of profit, find someone to develop this in magento, and then basically hire some data entry people for $2/hr or something.

      The SEO I would say minimum charge 1K/mo but I would think average for bigger ecommerce sites would be around 2-3k/mo with the higher end being between 5-10k. The main thing is you want to be able to give enough results that it justifies the spending. That is why bigger SEO firms would rather do the 2k/mo which would be 24k a year instead of 5k for 3 months and them stop because the ROI doesn't justify.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gilgul
    I would second Magento. It is very robust and can be scaled easily. Problem is that learning curve is steep and I would hate to see a client pissed off on a big ticket project because the developer is just learning Magento.

    I would quote development and product loading separately:

    Development - Figure design of 4 layouts (home, category, product, about/text) + integration + customization (go for $10k).

    Product Loading - You do not want to get bogged down by repetitive, boring product addition so figure out how much an outsourcer would cost and bill by the hour / day / month and mark it up. Or client's employees can take care of that.

    EDIT: Feel free to contact me if you need help w Magento.

    Lastly, need to consider SEO. A 15k page site would not be easy. Think just building meta tags, alt tags and unique descriptions across all pages... Would take you a year if you go through all of them and if you don't, you will get a lot of content/crawling issues. One possible solution is build the initial site using the top 500-1000 selling items, then on a monthly basis adding more products and optimizing while at it.
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    • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
      Originally Posted by Gilgul View Post

      I would second Magento. It is very robust and can be scaled easily. Problem is that learning curve is steep and I would hate to see a client pissed off on a big ticket project because the developer is just learning Magento.

      I would quote development and product loading separately:

      Development - Figure design of 4 layouts (home, category, product, about/text) + integration + customization (go for $10k).

      Product Loading - You do not want to get bogged down by repetitive, boring product addition so figure out how much an outsourcer would cost and bill by the hour / day / month and mark it up. Or client's employees can take care of that.

      Lastly, need to consider SEO. A 15k page site would not be easy. Think just building meta tags, alt tags and unique descriptions across all pages... Would take you a year if you go through all of them and if you don't, you will get a lot of content/crawling issues. One possible solution is build the initial site using the top 500-1000 selling items, then on a monthly basis adding more products and optimizing while at it.
      Agree with product loading... ideal to outsource that.

      SEO for ecommerce sites is not that difficult. Last month we just completed a site with 20k products... the total project with uploading products, and the on page optimization took roughly 7 weeks.

      The big thing is having a good team. With a mediocre and poor team you can't take these bigger projects on. Project management is key here.
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      • Profile picture of the author stone2010
        Originally Posted by iAmNameLess View Post

        Agree with product loading... ideal to outsource that.

        SEO for ecommerce sites is not that difficult. Last month we just completed a site with 20k products... the total project with uploading products, and the on page optimization took roughly 7 weeks.

        The big thing is having a good team. With a mediocre and poor team you can't take these bigger projects on. Project management is key here.

        You are right about having a great team... I usually work solo so it would be nice to put a good team together with something like this. I want to get as much info as possible an have things ready so I can send the proposal that way of the client wants to do it I'm ready to go
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        • Profile picture of the author FrankRumbauskas
          CONGRATS! Big clients like this are sooooo nice. I can tell you that one $5,000/month client in my AdWords business will be less trouble than any one of the $500/month small biz clients. Funny how it works out that way.
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          • Profile picture of the author stone2010
            Originally Posted by FrankRumbauskas View Post

            CONGRATS! Big clients like this are sooooo nice. I can tell you that one $5,000/month client in my AdWords business will be less trouble than any one of the $500/month small biz clients. Funny how it works out that way.
            Thank you... Hopefully I'm able to close his job and get it going asap
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  • Profile picture of the author stone2010
    Great info guys... I would love to Partner up with one of you guys with experience to give me a hand with this... Like I said the seo part I m not worried about, I have a few big seo clients that I deal with and a lot of areas being targeted. Of one of you guys are interested to help me with this pm me with your quotes etc I rather work with someone that has done it before instead of start to learn magneto I don't have the time to learn a new platform.
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  • Profile picture of the author tabt76
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    • Profile picture of the author stone2010
      Originally Posted by tabt76 View Post

      I would hate to see a client pissed off on a big ticket project because the developer is just learning Magento.

      Agree thats why I want someone with experience to help me out and partner up. I will start playing around with magneto to learn for future projects. I just to to be ready to send out a proposal since I don't know what to charge and how to base it on. So far this posts have been giving me ideas on how much to charge
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