What should I bid on an ecommerce website with a very large catalogue of items?
Stephanie S asked:
I am preparing to bid on the design and coding of an ecommerce site using Paypal and PHP (the easiest way to do it, I believe). The site is a lingerie site, and will have roughly around 1200 different items to choose from, some with different color choices, most with different size choices and prices. Even if I create a database and do the PHP to reduce what would be an enormous amount of html, this is still going to be a lot of data-entering and work. I have a feeling that most lingerie sites do not carry this much stuff, so I’m worried that the owners are trying to get me to cheap the price while they unload this monster catalog on me. This is the biggest site I have ever tackled, so I would greatly appreciate any advice from seasoned ‘pros’ out there. I have a degree in web development but am still green on freelancing. I am US based in the Mid-West (Michigan.)
I am preparing to bid on the design and coding of an ecommerce site using Paypal and PHP (the easiest way to do it, I believe). The site is a lingerie site, and will have roughly around 1200 different items to choose from, some with different color choices, most with different size choices and prices. Even if I create a database and do the PHP to reduce what would be an enormous amount of html, this is still going to be a lot of data-entering and work. I have a feeling that most lingerie sites do not carry this much stuff, so I’m worried that the owners are trying to get me to cheap the price while they unload this monster catalog on me. This is the biggest site I have ever tackled, so I would greatly appreciate any advice from seasoned ‘pros’ out there. I have a degree in web development but am still green on freelancing. I am US based in the Mid-West (Michigan.)
I did a similar site. They had all their items on an Ebay Store, over 3000 items.
I programmed a script that read in all the Ebay items and saved them to the database, saved the product image, auto-thumbnailed it, etc. This script, when ran, got all 3000 items transfered into the database in about 6 hours.
But if you had to do it manually, that would be crazy.
But anyway, I charged about $1,500 for the transfer script, the database programming, the site design, and the custom shopping cart code that tied into PayPal.
I hope this helps.
I would recommend the E-Commerce startup kit for ASP.net.
The web server wouuld have to be windows. ASP.NET is free with XP-pro, windows server, etc. The Visual Studio 2005 Express tools (VC#, VB, Visual Web Developer, SQL-Server Express, …) are all free tools from microsoft.
With Visual Web Developer, the master pages can be used for all of the navigation types of links. The content pages only need to describe the content. If the content pages are data driven, you will only have a few different content pages for all of your products.
A basic version of an E-Commerce site with product categories, product details, a shopping cart, paypal processing etc is free at
You may want to add additional admin pages to allow for accepting spreadsheet files to perform some rapid loading of the catalog database, and for rapid uploading of the images associated with those catalog items.
For more on visual studio including training videos, I have collected a set of links for free ASP.net tools and training.
Check bids for simmilar projects at websites like
It would really depend on how you are going to be recieving the catalogue. if they are going to give it to you in a spreadsheet or csv, then just a couple hours to write a script to populate your database. otherwise, figure it takes you x minutes to enter 1 product and charge based on that. so if it takes you 10 minutes per product, charge them (1200 / 6)* hourly rate.
The site should definetly be written in a scripting language like php using a database. This would allow you to basically have 1 product template page that loads in any product from the database instead of having a page for every product. figure out how long you think it will take to program the site and then multiply that by your hourly rate.