Hi all, I am a small-scale freelance web designer and am looking to move into offering e-commerce sites, which up until now I've avoided. The reason I've avoided them is because I find most clients to be an absolute nightmare in terms of getting decent, legible content, getting decent photographs and all the rest of it (I'm sure you all have the same problem). This problem can be overcome on a fairly standard text and images website of, say, 5-20 pages. I can imagine, however, that with some of the local shops I would like to target that they will have hundreds or, God forbid, even thousands of items in their shop. Many shops are of a 'craft' nature, so it won't be as simple as just pasting a manufacturer's description. My question is - what procedure do you guys have when selling e-commerce websites? Building the site and implementing the cart is the easy bit, it's the hours upon hours of adding content that scares me. Most clients I've worked with are absolutely useless at managing their own websites and so I can't imagine letting many of them loose in the back end to add product descriptions, prices, pictures etc. I wouldn't be too bothered about doing it myself, but do you find clients are willing to pay the minimum of £20 an hour a web designer would charge?
Hello there, I am not a web designer, but I am planning to start an e-commerce site. I would say if you can provide some high quality work in designing a website, of course I am willing to pay 20/hr. What I meant is your design should not be similar to what most of the websites have. Most of the big companies they actually spent a lot of money to design their website to make it stand out from the crowd. Just my personal opinion.
I would personally avoid entering content all together. Maybe add a couple items for them to reference what you did, but in the end if that's what keeps you from doing e-commerce just tell them you don't do data entry. Tack on a few more hours to train them if need be.