Question on building a site for a friend with shopping cart..Please Help

[karel]

Well I will get straight to the point....A friend of mine wanted me to do some changes to his ecommerce site, which I completed a couple of days ago. The problem is you are very limited to what you can do with these sites and they are not SEO friendly. After me telling him a few things, he hinted that he may want a complete new site building.

He currently pays £20/$40 a month for this site. Now I have no experience at all of building shopping carts and would probably have to get some help and pay someone on here to assist.

My question is would it hold the 12,000 items he wants, is there a monthly charge to use it, what payment methods can he take?

Sorry for all the questions but I don't want to promise him anything before I find somethings out.

Thanks for any help with this

Paul

[Karen Mac]

Re: Question on building a site for a friend with shopping cart..Please Help

Its my understanding that soho will hold unlimited amounts of products, but keep in mind that is a very large database indeed. He probably would be better off running several stores to really market that much.. but thats a different subject.

If he buys a voda host account there is no charge for the soho. Monthly fees would occur in his merchant account, ssl, and certificate, and dedicated ip. Depending on who he uses, i cant say for the merchant account, but dedicated ip and ssl certificate is about 100 bucks a year thru voda host, plus or minus some change depending on the specials.

I dont do monthly monitoring, I have enough other stuff to do without babysitting everyone elses sites so to speak, and forewarning that update stuff can get to be time consuming.. just letting you know since u asked in general how that works. Be careful what you bite off and make sure you specify exactly what your time entails, as you could be restoring a site etc... i set up and run, and give moral support, but even that is time consuming some days.

It sounds like he has bought into one of those prepopulated hosting situations, and you also need to know if he can take his products with him, otherwise you are just spinning wheels.

Also about the average going rate is $75 bucks per hour for this sort of thing, you can probably get someone to consult a little cheaper, depending on the involvement you need and how much handholding the customer needs.

Karen

[Karen Mac]

Re: Question on building a site for a friend with shopping cart..Please Help

Payment methods by the way are dependent upon rather or not he has a merchant account and what gateways hes compatible with.

Karen

[karel]

Re: Question on building a site for a friend with shopping cart..Please Help

Thank you for your in-depth answer Karen, it was a real help and tells me everything I need to know. I think you are right with the baby sitting side of things, as he knows nothing about websites etc...So I feel I would be looking after the site for the rest of my days.

You helped make my mind up!!!!

Thanks again

Paul

[Karen Mac]

Re: Question on building a site for a friend with shopping cart..Please Help

Paul

You're welcome. Ecommerce is slightly different than just building a site, so theres alot more involved to it, and I really just scratched the surface. Your customer/friend, needs to learn to do it, and involve themselves as much as possible or it can be a real hair pulling experience of the third kind. I only know from developing my own what it really takes and involves, so I hate to see someone who has never done it get blind sided and in over their heads. Babysitting/handholding might be a blunt term, but frankly, its easier to actually take care of kids sometimes..LOL

Karen