Hi We are a company looking to build our first ecommerce site for our family business, which will have a quite a few specialized features. Design-wise we have found a site that is very, very similar to our preferences (http://www.vacheron-constantin.com/en/). However, this site is not an ecommerce site. We were wondering if anyone has any ideas on how we should proceed in order to figure out potential cost and implementation challenges we face (perhaps some of you can see some of these challenges immediately?) as our programming experience is limited. Initially, we are looking at using Magento. Our first choice would be to hire a web developer and just ask. However, our budget is limited and we would like to get an idea of the cost before we get in over our head from a cost perspective. Any help would be highly appreciated Thank you for your time and effort. P.S.: We also wish to help the developer as much as possible and we were wondering if anyone has a template of sort on how, and what kind of, information we should give to the developer (we don't want this to happen: http://www.topwebdesignschools.org/design-clients/).
I looked at the site that you posted. Can you list some of the functionality that you need? I have seen some templates that look similar, but I'll see if I can find one that will fit as closely to your needs as possible.
yeah sure. I can hep develop a system for you at a reasonable cost. please share your exact details and queries at my email where I can show you some of our latest magento projects too. you can contact me at @gmail.com
hello carljohan i just check your all detail i have 5 years exp in e commerce website development and 3.7 years in Magento 1.5,1.6,1.7 currently working on 1.8 , i had made around 57+ e commerce website for more detail contact me , Skype:satyajitkashyap And you dont worry about cost for me quality matter ,Kindly contact me i will send you my portfolio and some mockup design as per your requirement
Thanks Garrett. A few of the features we were thinking of implementing would be stuff like awarding the customers loyalty points for purchasing certain goods that, once earnt, could be spent to for instance unlock some (secret) free products. Preferably, these points would be visible on the site (for instance in the top-right corner), even when browsing around the page. We were also thinking of letting the customers choose they're own price (above a certain minimum) on the products, i.e. if the minimum is ten they can choose to for instance pay 30 and the remaining 20 would go to charity.
I would strongly advise against Magento. The platform itself is solid if you are a larger e-commerce shop or if you are going with their full paid version. But for most companies I would recommend started out scaled back slightly and going with a hosted version as that will take care of compliance issues and a host of other technical issues. Magento can really be quite a beast to work with. A proper implementation of Magento with custom features will cost you north of $7,000 and more likely in the $15k range if you hire someone who knows what they are doing. Of course, you can go the cheap route and get bad code, but the impact on Magento's speed will be noticeable. I would strongly look elsewhere and scale back where you need to. If you find the e-commerce side starts to take off, then you will have a larger budget to implement a more robust implementation like a fully coded out magento.
I lean towards qlbbroker's advice, staying away from Magento. Especially starting a business. Although you may be restricted slightly by using a less expensive platform, if you are just starting a business, your basic needs can be met with other platforms. Once you have traffic to your site, and a decent audience, you can always move to Magento. I will look into your feature idea, and see if I can find something that will work.
I am a huge fan of wordpress. Here is a plugin that may have some of the functionality that you described. http://wordpress.org/plugins/shopper-rewards-free-for-wp-ecommerce/ I'll install it on one of my websites and give you a little feedback, as it has none directly from wordpress. If you build your site on wordpress, you can buy very attractive/clean templates that are inexpensive, and there are countless plugins for features if you know where to look. Feel free to chime in if anyone has input on my comments.