Approached by someone to build an E-commerce store - what do I charge?

[speedy_s]

Hi

I had created my own E-commerce store using Magento Commerce (http://www.magentocommerce.com) as the back end. Now someone has approached me wanting to do the same for their store as their current website is very outdated and is running on oscommerce with no change in the default theme.

Now, I would be delighted to work on their store but I have no idea how much to charge! They going rate for Magento Commerce designers/developers is around £40-75/hour, obviously I am not a pro so just wondering what would be a fair /hour charge would be? How much do designers and php developers here charge per hour?

I will have to set up the ecommerce package, skin it, make a few programming changes, import products and customers from oscommerce and then do SEO, SEM and may be adwords!

[petersoftware]

A good way of working out the price would be to work out how long a professional would take to do it. Multiple their number of hours by their hourly rate. Take this total and divide it by the number of hours you think it will take you to complete the job. You now have your hourly rate.

e.g.:

100 hours * £50 = £5000
£5000 / 150 house = £33.33 hourly rate

[PointandStare]

To be honest, whacking together a templated site is easy, using magento or not.
Making it not look like a whacked together magento site is another ball game entirely.

What you should charge depends on what you think your (limited?) skills are worth.

I think you should show us what you've done first before anyone can put a price on it.

[speedy_s]

You can have a look at my site by clicking on the name and then selecting 'View Speedy_s's Homepage!'

PLEASE kindly do not post the site link on the posts :)

[PointandStare]

As I thought, it's a standard magento template with a few small tweaks (not saying it's a bad thing though) so it shouldn't take more than a day or 2 to get that working although knowing magento as I do it could take a week just to get it installed!

:)

[speedy_s]

What do you charge /hour?

Also, by 1 week you mean the site would take a pro 37.5 hrs to put together?

[speedy_s]

Ignore my last post, I can't edit it for some reason! So you are saying someone could build what I have done from scratch with magento in 15 working hours? Even the design elements?

[dataferret]

You should break the job down into its individual tasks then work out how many hours it will take you to complete each task. This should help you at least arrive at a fixed number of hours for you to do what is required. You already know the hourly rate being charged by other people so a good rule of thumb would be to reduce your hourly rate and explain to your client this is because you are still learning the trade, hence they are saving money by using you to do the job.

Transparency is everything. If you are honest with yourself and your client from the beginning you will save yourself from a lot of problems in future. There is no point pretending you can do a top notch professional job in the same time it would take someone who does this every day for a living.

So an example:

Upload and Install Magento to FTP site, set permissions etc: 30 minutes
Create Database and set users, permissions, passwords etc: 30 minutes
Install Magento as per the installation system and test etc: 20 minutes
Download and install UK specific plugins, modules, mail etc: 30 minutes
Create design mocks in photoshop and convert to magento: 180 minutes

The above is an example only and serves just to give you an idea of how to break the job into tasks which will allow you to schedule timescales. Then it is a simple matter of fixing your price based on the time it will take you to complete the job. Whether your price is competitive will depend on several factors but at least you have a starting point from which to work - you can adjust the price to reflect your lack of skills/knowledge.

Learning how to cost up a job is tricky but it gets easier as you learn new skills because you get a feel for how long things take. Pricing should be personal to you not influenced by what other people charge. There will always be someone who can do it cheaper/faster/more feature packed. Fix your price/hourly rate based on your own skills and experience plus your own costs then provided you are happy with it be proud to charge it.

Hope this helps :)

[Burden]

im wanting a site like you have there but people seem to want to charge through the nose for it :(

[PointandStare]

How much does a car cost?
That's how much an online store costs.

[Burden]

if it was just a case of installing a magento store and not a full overhaul so it doesnt look like its a Magento store then it not pay more than £100 really.