'*' How Much Would You Charge For E-Commerce Setup?

It completely depends on you, your efforts and the way you do things. If you are going to use any existing scripts of eCommerce to create it then your charges will be low as compared to your own custom script. So the price of your work is directly promotional to your efforts and your talent. You can ask for what price you think is suitable for you by telling your key points that other eCommerce developers lack of.

We usually do a set up fee and then per product.

Set up is about $600 and then $25 per product with full seo and social linking.

Q

How on earth do you arrive at those figures??

The solution should vary with the size of the problem.

"How many items do you expect to sell every month with this ecommerce system, once it's set up? And this is all new revenue to you, right?"

"And what's the average revenue value of one of these items?"

"I see. Multiplied together, that's...$Y?"

"Now over a year, that's (12 X Y) in brand new revenue."

"OK. So to implement this system, the investment will be (it's up to you--5 to 33-1/3% of the total X at least 2 years, maybe as many as 5 years). Does that sound fair?"

...

So they tell you they figure they'll sell 1000 items per month on average.

And the typical value is $50.

That comes out to $50,000 per month in new revenue to them. Revenue they never had before.

$50,000 X 12 = $600,000 a year in new revenue.

$600,000 X 2 years (low lifetime value) = $1.2 million. Ka-ching!

This is the size of the problem you are solving for them.

A measly 5% of this value you're creating is $60,000.

People will easily spend $1 to make $10. This figure is much less than that.


With our friend's calc above, you would charge $13,100 (500 X $25 + $600).


How much money have you been leaving on the table?

Stop thinking in terms of labor and data entry, and start thinking like a solution provider.

It all depends on the technology you intend to use. Would you code the site from scratch with PHP or would you use a CMS to easily set everything up?
If you're not too technical, then a CMS is more advisable. An ecommerce site with 500 products will be charged not less than $3,500. Though it also depends on the Niche.

It doesn't depend on the niche... standard for 500 products is about 5k on the lower end for design.