E Commerce site

s4uv3

Hi everyone, looking for a small bit of guidance on something please.
I'm getting into distribution of an existing product. They have a large international market, but my end is going to focus on the smaller domestic market. It's a food product.

I'll need a ****-hot website, it won't have a huge amount of content, but will need to look the part. I'm not yet sure if I'll need extra graphic design or will be using existing branding.
I've approached a website developer who I'm to meet with next week who has quoted me a ballpark figure of 2-3 thousand.

Does that sound about right for what I need? Is there a better way I could be approaching it?

tricky D

Get a few quotes. A few thousand would not be off the mark but of course depends on what you are getting.

Scotty #

It's a bit like asking "how much does a car cost?"

4 out of 5 ecommerce sites fail in the first year. Don't go spending thousands straight off the bat. You can set up a perfectly good ecommerce site for less than a few hundred. Consider the likes of Shopify which cost about €30/month particularly if you are only listing a small amount of products. Or, you could set it up yourself with something like Prestashop or Opencart.

Good luck with the business!!

Ronan_wals

ya scotty is right, you could spend 10000 and still not have what you need.

also,as an SEO consultant id advise you to rethink "it won't have a huge amount of content" unless you've found a new niche that's never been done before.

If you want traffic coming to the site you'll need content and a promotion strategy that gets you backlinks. Your other option is to use paid search but you'll struggle if that's your only way your getting traffic to your site as it will cost a lot at the start and you'll have no other source of income to absorb this cost.

Make sure you've a good marketing strategy before you spend any money or time on the site as its pretty much useless unless it has traffic.

RoRo979

Second shopify or even a WordPress/WooCommerce mix

maccored

2-3 thousand is quite cheap - but rent a server from a hosting company, install wordpress on it, find a free theme and the woocommerce plugin, process payments through paypal and you could be online pretty cheaply

Scotty #

maccored wrote: »

2-3 thousand is quite cheap

That depends on what you are getting for your money. It could just as easily be quite expensive. There's a few cowboys out there.

I know a company who paid €14000 for a small ecommerce site (about 10 years ago). They were delighted with it but it was running on Joomla with the Virtuemart plugin! It was even running on a free template!

Do not hand over thousands of Euro to any company until you do your research. Ask them what platform they are using? What payment options they provide? Is training included? Etc, etc, etc. Ecommerce sites are never 'finished'. There are always improvements to be made, upgrades, security checks. Is any of this included?

And then, when you have your sparkly new site up and running, as Ronan_wals pointed out, how are you going to get visitors? SEO plays the BIGGEST part in the success/failure of any website and probably deserves a bigger budget than the website itself. Again though, this is another field where it's very easy to throw your money (and lots of it) down the drain.