Building the ebay website

[LewisTintin]

Purely out of interest... How much do you think it would cost to build the ebay website from scratch. Including all their functionality, and ignoring the fact they have full time developers.
I've seen some pretty scary quotes for websites lately and it got me thinking, how much would a monster of a website like ebay actually cost to build.
I don't see it being that technologically advanced? It does very little but hosts lots. (appologees if I have massively simplified something ludicriously complicated).

My thoughts start at £200k, for a webdeveloper to actually begin to produce it. Ignoring to some extent the volume of traffic and robustness that has obviously been built into ebay as a result of the traffic.

[dilbert]

LewisTintin said:

Purely out of interest... How much do you think it would cost to build the ebay website from scratch. Including all their functionality, and ignoring the fact they have full time developers.
I've seen some pretty scary quotes for websites lately and it got me thinking, how much would a monster of a website like ebay actually cost to build.
I don't see it being that technologically advanced? It does very little but hosts lots. (appologees if I have massively simplified something ludicriously complicated).

My thoughts start at £200k, for a webdeveloper to actually begin to produce it. Ignoring to some extent the volume of traffic and robustness that has obviously been built into ebay as a result of the traffic.

I think you have to set the scope on that better.

What are you thinking? Parts no Labour?

[LewisTintin]

Fair point.
Assume just building the site. So labour costs. No graphic design or anything like that. The costs of programming the site, making it work, everything link. Ignore the hostings costs, and no doubt vast ammount of IT they have.

[randlemarcus]

If its of any use, then using a third party to do everything from scratch for a website with a backend clever clever app, external feeds etc etc was north of £7M from a recent bit of work I was doing.

[dilbert]

LewisTintin said:

Fair point.
Assume just building the site. So labour costs. No graphic design or anything like that. The costs of programming the site, making it work, everything link. Ignore the hostings costs, and no doubt vast ammount of IT they have.

So you're after the difficult bit then.

You know, it's not a clear cut thing like that. I have no idea what ebay actually have, but the thing with these big sites, is that they generally grow. You don't just come along and drop ebay into an office, and off you go. The site might broadly look the same as it did a couple of years back, but I'm almost certain that the internals of the beast have changed considerably.

I'd imagine that when you start out, you're constrained massively by resources. As demand grows your resources follow. The physical implementation of the solution changes hand in hand with the software. Even graphic design is going to be connected with the detailed design, because the ultimate aim is to produce a user interface that works intuatively.

The big problem with any large scale integrated development is comunication. If you know everything that's happening, then you can implement relatively quickly, but the bigger the beast is, the more people you need to get it done in reasonable time. The more people you have the harder it is to know whats going on.

I can't tell you how much e-bay would cost, but it has to be multiple millions. What I can do is give you an indication of the scale of the communication problem.

I know to perhaps an 80% confidence that a project that might take 20 people a year, can be achieved by one person in about three years.

It's much more about the way you do it, than what you're trying to do.

HTH.

Edited by dilbert on Thursday 19th July 17:51

[dabeeeenster]

You could probably implement the functionality of the site using a modern web application framework with around 500k sterling. Maybe even less.

Getting it to scale to millions of products/users/auctions with thousands of requests per second in a fully fault tolerant environment is the hard/expensive part. Be prepared to pay Larry Ellison a serious amount of cash on top of that too.

Edited by dabeeeenster on Thursday 19th July 22:29

[roadsweeper]

dabeeeenster said:

You could probably implement the functionality of the site using a modern web application framework with around 500k sterling. Maybe even less.

Getting it to scale to millions of products/users/auctions with thousands of requests per second in a fully fault tolerant environment is the hard/expensive part. Be prepared to pay Larry Ellison a serious amount of cash on top of that too.

Edited by dabeeeenster on Thursday 19th July 22:29

The thing is, you would have an existing site to base your design around and building something a second time (or closely mirroring something someone else has built and released so you can see it) is far cheaper than going through all the trial and error and brainstorming the first time around. I like to think of the ring pull on drinks cans. If you remember the original one that used to come off and be thrown on the floor by chavs was replaced maybe 15 years ago by the current ones that folder open and back and stay attached. I remember that cost a huge amount of money to design, but to produce something very similar with the result of those labours in front of you would be much cheaper.

[dilbert]

roadsweeper said:

dabeeeenster said:

You could probably implement the functionality of the site using a modern web application framework with around 500k sterling. Maybe even less.

Getting it to scale to millions of products/users/auctions with thousands of requests per second in a fully fault tolerant environment is the hard/expensive part. Be prepared to pay Larry Ellison a serious amount of cash on top of that too.

Edited by dabeeeenster on Thursday 19th July 22:29

The thing is, you would have an existing site to base your design around and building something a second time (or closely mirroring something someone else has built and released so you can see it) is far cheaper than going through all the trial and error and brainstorming the first time around. I like to think of the ring pull on drinks cans. If you remember the original one that used to come off and be thrown on the floor by chavs was replaced maybe 15 years ago by the current ones that folder open and back and stay attached. I remember that cost a huge amount of money to design, but to produce something very similar with the result of those labours in front of you would be much cheaper.

The old style ones were great. You could pull the ring from the tab, and use the tab as a spring to launch the ring. Flew like a frizbee, went miles!!! Sad loss those things.

Edited by dilbert on Friday 20th July 00:53

[dabeeeenster]

roadsweeper said:

dabeeeenster said:

You could probably implement the functionality of the site using a modern web application framework with around 500k sterling. Maybe even less.

Getting it to scale to millions of products/users/auctions with thousands of requests per second in a fully fault tolerant environment is the hard/expensive part. Be prepared to pay Larry Ellison a serious amount of cash on top of that too.

Edited by dabeeeenster on Thursday 19th July 22:29

The thing is, you would have an existing site to base your design around and building something a second time (or closely mirroring something someone else has built and released so you can see it) is far cheaper than going through all the trial and error and brainstorming the first time around. I like to think of the ring pull on drinks cans. If you remember the original one that used to come off and be thrown on the floor by chavs was replaced maybe 15 years ago by the current ones that folder open and back and stay attached. I remember that cost a huge amount of money to design, but to produce something very similar with the result of those labours in front of you would be much cheaper.

My figure takes that into account. Ebay have probably spent a few quid more than 500,000 in dev costs...

[Simpo Two]

I'm sure I could knock something up in FrontPage

Here's a scary thought - whatever the eBay site would actually cost to make from scratch, software, hardware, programming etc - think if HM Govt tried to do it - it would cost 20 times as much, take 20 times longer and it wouldn't work!

[russ_a]

the only complex development work within ebay would be the search functionality. very very fast and accurate

[LewisTintin]

Simpo Two said:

I'm sure I could knock something up in FrontPage

Here's a scary thought - whatever the eBay site would actually cost to make from scratch, software, hardware, programming etc - think if HM Govt tried to do it - it would cost 20 times as much, take 20 times longer and it wouldn't work!

Its sad thats its true!

Does seem a mega amount of money though. Surely the site had 40% of its current functionality prior to it becomming a mega company. Thus not such large costs. A lot of additional tweaks have no doubt been added, but the core functionality, the initial bit, surely not that much.

No doubt the ability to handle such huge volumes of traffic is where much of teh development costs are incurred, but again, i would imagine that as it was a first of its kind product, these days a replica would be far less. We can learn from there mistakes? What do you think?

[Roop]

eBay is made up of several components, none massively complex. There's a fat-ass DB, for user details, auction listings etc plus a powerful search engine. Tacked on the back is PayPal to handle secure transactions and that's about it.

The clever bit is in the load balancing, fault tolerance and mirroring of data and indices across multiple servers worldwide. IIRC they use various server types as well - Sun in the UK but US servers are IBM.

Cost is likely to be huge due to working on multiple servers in multiple locations and the code that has to be written to work that effectively and accurately.

As an aside, I used to work for a company specialising in online DB's and content management systems. We reckoned between three developers, we could knock up a faster, easier to use and more reliable Friends Reunited in a fortnight no problems.

You could build a basic mini-eBay clone minus the transaction processing (PayPal) in the same amount of time. I'm talking single server, low volume prototype. It's not rocket science.

[Marcel_PL]

If You order this to some company from Ukraina or Poland it will kost 80 % less than in UK. If You realy think about making something like this contact me [e-mail]
Regards.

[Altrezia]

Roop said:

You could build a basic mini-eBay clone minus the transaction processing (PayPal) in the same amount of time. I'm talking single server, low volume prototype. It's not rocket science.

No chance. I currently work for a company that DOES make ebay clones, amongst many other types of website, and 2 weeks is madness, even for a prototype. (unless you simply want a POC, but there's no point in that since ebay's done it for you)

[rpguk]

Altrezia said:

Roop said:

You could build a basic mini-eBay clone minus the transaction processing (PayPal) in the same amount of time. I'm talking single server, low volume prototype. It's not rocket science.

No chance. I currently work for a company that DOES make ebay clones, amongst many other types of website, and 2 weeks is madness, even for a prototype. (unless you simply want a POC, but there's no point in that since ebay's done it for you)

I remember there used to be loads of off the self template based scripts that did much of what ebay does. I don't think it's that unfeasible using those.

[AlunR]

If you look at the simple ebay functionality then it isn't a difficult site.

1. User Data
2. Product/Auction Data
3. Bid Data
4. Payment System
5. Search facility

It's a couple of weeks work to build a usable prototype.

To make it all fully secure etc, load balance etc that's the hard bit.

If you are serious about building something contact me via my profile.

[escargot]

Marcel_PL said:

If You order this to some company from Ukraina or Poland it will kost 80 % less than in UK. If You realy think about making something like this contact me [e-mail]
Regards.

[bga]

escargot said:

Marcel_PL said:

If You order this to some company from Ukraina or Poland it will kost 80 % less than in UK. If You realy think about making something like this contact me [e-mail]
Regards.

There are some sh1t hot programmers coming out of Ukraine right now.
One of my clients is outsourcing some coding to a firm out there & they are very impressed. Saving is about 60% on UK at the moment with a lot fewer quality issues than sending it to India

[Plotloss]

Theres probably over £100Ks worth of load balancers and switches.

Let alone database servers and webservers.

Way north of £1m I'd expect.