Ecommerce, complete system costs.

[EINSIGN]

Expert opinions please:

1/ ecommerce system offering website (similar spec to amazon etc) costs £26,000

2/ system allows stock control, order processing, invoicing, connection to sage and lots more, report generating and so on..

3/ annual “support” fee of £4,500

4/ suits company £1-5m turnover, with up to 50 staff, unlimited products.

5/ maybe several white label sites for individual product groups all controlled by same back end system.

Plus lots more, but basically what could you expect to pay for something like this? Wanting to sell online but have multiple tools in the background that handle a lot of the traditional admin duties automatically.

Thanks

[jon-]

£26,000?

Get a Magento install, buy a nice design and some plugins and you could have it for less than £10k. At the other end of a spectrum a fully bespoke package could run into 6 figures.

[sonic_2k_uk]

The system sounds pretty large and £26k doesn't sound unreasonable if that's from planning -> launch.

Also if the annual "support" costs include a decent dedicated hosting solution that sounds about right too.

[purplepolarbear]

By the sounds of it they have a generic e-commerce product and the price includes a component for a license for the product and x days development time tailoring it to your requirements.

The amount of development time would depend on how closely your business fits with a standard package and how prepared you are to accept this even if it doesn't quite match what you would ideally want, and how much custom work needs to be done, e.g. to feed information into and out of different systems you have. It will also depend on how sophisticated any design work is.

If I'm right, can you let us know what will have to be customised and how many days development time are included in the quote.

£4.5K sounds cheap for support if it includes dedicated hosting on your own server with redundancy and firewalls etc. You might want to look into what exactly this includes. You probably want to look at what is provided our of hours for support - if it's a one man band company they won't have a 24x7 helpline.

[rich1231]

jon- said:

£26,000?

Get a Magento install, buy a nice design and some plugins and you could have it for less than £10k. At the other end of a spectrum a fully bespoke package could run into 6 figures.

You dont trust a resonable sized ecommerce store with a software package that isnt supported professionally.

Magento Enterprise yes not bog standard Magento though.

[rich1231]

Ecommerce package, full Warehouse/Order management system, that can also run purchasing and drop ship integrate, multi channel etc.. less than 5k and less than a 1k a year for support. Add hosting and we can do £3m plus with 7 staff. Any number of different stores can run off the platform from the same infrastructure.

[jon-]

rich1231 said:

jon- said:

£26,000?

Get a Magento install, buy a nice design and some plugins and you could have it for less than £10k. At the other end of a spectrum a fully bespoke package could run into 6 figures.

You dont trust a resonable sized ecommerce store with a software package that isnt supported professionally.

Magento Enterprise yes not bog standard Magento though.

While I 100% agree, there are now a number of companies that will resell and support Magento community edition with all the SLA's you'd expect.

[rich1231]

jon- said:

rich1231 said:

jon- said:

£26,000?

Get a Magento install, buy a nice design and some plugins and you could have it for less than £10k. At the other end of a spectrum a fully bespoke package could run into 6 figures.

You dont trust a resonable sized ecommerce store with a software package that isnt supported professionally.

Magento Enterprise yes not bog standard Magento though.

While I 100% agree, there are now a number of companies that will resell and support Magento community edition with all the SLA's you'd expect.

it needs big tin to run as well.

Not trying to be too critical of magento, but there comes a point that your store fronts availability is worth more than cheap or free software cost savings.

Lots of features missing from Magento for UK based stores still, and custom features and addons are a difficult risk to swallow

[jon-]

rich1231 said:

it needs big tin to run as well.

Not trying to be too critical of magento, but there comes a point that your store fronts availability is worth more than cheap or free software cost savings.

Lots of features missing from Magento for UK based stores still, and custom features and addons are a difficult risk to swallow

"Big Tin", I like that phrase

Again, I agree with what you say, but as I'm helping a friend look at store platforms for his start up it would have been silly to ignore magento, as it provides fantastic value for money if nothing else. Consider the cost of a platform like fresca or venda!

Take a look at this "solution partner", http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/view/213/p... - they seem to be able to polish the platform better than most.

Anyway, I'm not trying to sell magento, if I was doing something for myself I'd probably want to write it from scratch (that's the developer in me) but it certainly earnt its place in the market now.

[Andrew[MG]]

Another thumbs up for the Magento platform. It might not be fully geared to the UK market but with some experienced developers behind it then the possibilities are (almost) endless.

Rich1231, what system/company are you working with? Feel free to PM

EINSIGN, how far down the path of choosing a solution are you?

[threesixty]

EINSIGN said:

Expert opinions please:

1/ ecommerce system offering website (similar spec to amazon etc) costs £26,000

2/ system allows stock control, order processing, invoicing, connection to sage and lots more, report generating and so on..

3/ annual “support” fee of £4,500

4/ suits company £1-5m turnover, with up to 50 staff, unlimited products.

5/ maybe several white label sites for individual product groups all controlled by same back end system.

Plus lots more, but basically what could you expect to pay for something like this? Wanting to sell online but have multiple tools in the background that handle a lot of the traditional admin duties automatically.

Thanks

We looked at something similar recently, since our current setup is out of date and badly supported. Without knowing more details its impossible to comment really. We had people quote us far less than that and people who quoted a great deal more but offered a much more integrated solution than we thought was possible.

So far we've not done anything because we have other projects on the go and cant deal with the upheaval right now. If you find a solution you would reccomend please let me know, of all the IT people we've dealt with over the years theres so far been 1 company I'd reccomend to anyone

[LivinLaVidaLotus]

The big thing to be aware of with any solution you have developed, or open source/any other license, is that very soon it's going to have to be PA-DSS compliant if you handle the card numbers at all (along with your whole cardholder environment being PCI-DSS compliant), and if it's a new merchant account then it already has to be PA-DSS compliant else you could be in for quite substantial fines. Of course if you're punting the customer to Worldpay hosted payment form etc. then neither applies.

[rich1231]

LivinLaVidaLotus said:

The big thing to be aware of with any solution you have developed, or open source/any other license, is that very soon it's going to have to be PA-DSS compliant if you handle the card numbers at all (along with your whole cardholder environment being PCI-DSS compliant), and if it's a new merchant account then it already has to be PA-DSS compliant else you could be in for quite substantial fines. Of course if you're punting the customer to Worldpay hosted payment form etc. then neither applies.

Already mentioned that some services mean your own server never sees card numbers and all compliance can me laid at their feet.

[rich1231]

I actually thnk there is too much of a hang up on the crap software used.

All the cart should do is take orders and customer details.

If any volume is going through then you need to plug it in to an ERP/OMS systems to handle all processing. The website is just a facade.

Did I write that fing hell.

Edited by rich1231 on Monday 8th March 22:35

[jardinec]

nothing much to add, its just nice to see a web/e-commerce thread here that isnt a "what can make me a millionaire for a 67p investment"