How much to charge to web design a Ecommerce Site?

I know it's hard question answer and I know everyone says it depends.





Im a freelance web designer and I have built Commercial sites in the past but never a Ecommerce site before.





It is a small gift shop that wants a shopping cart and be able to accept credit cards. Should I give a flat fee for x amount of items to put on the site. Or should I charge per item.


They said there is around 100 - 200 items





I would have to:


-Take a photo of the item


-crop the picture


-upload the picture and put in on the site.


-create the add to shopping cart button for the item





How would I deal with upkeep with the site should I charge for a service contract for 6, 12 months?





How much should I charge for all this. Nothing crazy just html and the shopping cart.

How much to charge to web design a Ecommerce Site?
Use OSCommerce and you have a huge head start on the problem.





http://www.oscommerce.org





Also, ZenCart:





http://www.zencart.com
Reply:I can help you generate revenue form this account on a monthly basis through the credit card acceptance side of the service. We have partnered with many web designers and ecommerce providers to help them find revenue through the credit card processing volume from the merchant and shopping cart costs.





Email me for more info: sales@omnitranz.com
Reply:How do you normally charge? By the hour or by the job?





Let me tell you, I run a small web hosting company (www.cohenwebsvc.com, yes I'll shamelessly plug myself, and yes, my own website is no way near as good as my customers' sites) and it is these "little jobs" that are my biggest problem. For example, I have one customer (pays a flat fee for HOSTING) who always wants me to modify his site -- even after I built pages so that he can modify it himself (I can't dump him, he is both a friend and one of my first customers).





My worry is that you will not charge enough for all of the work you are going to have to do. Setting up the items and taking the pictures is going to take 10-30 minutes each -- and that assumes that the customer has all of the items ready for you to photograph. How long it takes to crop will be a function of how good you are with your toolset.





Suggestion? don't create a button for each item. Rather, use an off the shelf e-commerce product (there are several that are free) or use a database and php or perl to dynamically create the page and the button. This way, you create the pages once. You only have to add/remove records from your db as your customer adds/removes things.





For charging: I would have a fixed fee for the pages and database. Then a per-piece charge for the photos. Good luck
Reply:Ask Audra @


http://www.ecommerce-resources.org/


she knows all about it.

playing cards