Retail Website Development

[TheMagpie]

Hi all

I am looking to start a website which acts as a third party platform for retailers to sell goods through. I was wondering whether I could get some quotes/ recommendations re who could help to build an end-to-end website. I would envisage it working similar to lastminute.com or hotels.com, but obviously with delivery of real products as opposed to services.

Basically I would require something that operates along the lines below:

1) Retailer lists the number and price of the goods on MB, together with a brief description and pictures. They are able to update this whenever they want.
2) Customers can browse/ search all retiler's products once they come to website. They can register/ log in before purchase.
3) Upon checkout, the website sytem will either process the payment, then send payment to each retailer to fulfil, or alternatively let the payments be processed indivicually by each retailer's systems. Not sure how feasible the second option is -any thoughts?
4) Once payment/ purchase is confirmed, our website collates the details back to customers.
Any idea how much something like this would cost? I spoke to a company that mentioned in the region of £8K + - does this seem right? Do people have opinions on the following web/ software development companies:
1) WebcreationsUK
2) Geeks Limited
Appreciate the help!

 

[altwebdesign]

The price does seem about right, a website like this would require on first glance 3 levels of user access, Admin, Vendor, Your end client.
A lot and I mean a LOT of pre-planning would need to go into a project like this.
I have no experience of the software companies mentioned, but im sure you could go through their portfolio and email their clients and ask for feedback

 

[Gatorservices]

We could produce this type of website for 6.5k please go to gatorservices dot co dot uk, and remember that these companies charge more because they can, as with our company we will always beat your competitor.

 

[Astaroth]

The devil is in the detail and there are a lot of "options" there which could have a big impact on the costs. £8k would be at the lower end of the options range, in my opinion.

Many of the aggregators & networks etc will be consuming XML (be it files like Google Products or a webservice as per Hotels.com) and so not requiring their merchants to log in.

Who are your target market (from a retailer perspective)? Are you aiming at a niche? Depending on the sale of the operations your targeting will dictate how sophisticated you need it to be. If your recreating the likes of Etsy or other almost C2C type offerings then the sellers system can be relatively clunky and you can get away with it.

 

[PETTE]

This is a very large project. It will by no doubt be very costly.

 

[J-Wholesale]

Astaroth is correct. 8k is definitely cheap for a project like this. I'd go so far as to say it's so cheap that they can't have seen a detailed spec for the project before quoting it.

I'd say you need a full time relationship with a development company to get this off the ground, or even a developer in house. There's just no way I could see you taking a finished product from a web guy and then saying goodbye to him for something like this. There'd be changes that would be required every week, daily for the first few weeks.

Huge project.

 

[altwebdesign]

Astaroth is correct. 8k is definitely cheap for a project like this. I'd go so far as to say it's so cheap that they can't have seen a detailed spec for the project before quoting it.

I'd say you need a full time relationship with a development company to get this off the ground, or even a developer in house. There's just no way I could see you taking a finished product from a web guy and then saying goodbye to him for something like this. There'd be changes that would be required every week, daily for the first few weeks.

Huge project.

They key word here being "detailed spec"
I would probably require about 10 days to write up a detailed spec for this, a detailed spec is vitally important for a project like this, from there costs can be broken down easier.

 

[TheMagpie]

Thanks for the response guys. Being a non IT person, I kind of have an idea about the layout and how I would like the website to work, but was curious as to what you meant by a detailed spec...

Would this mean literally detailing how every page works ie what button does what etc? not really sure whre to start when talking to a web developer, as in do I just tell them the detailed business plan and what I would like website to do, or should I even say draw out in powerpoint what each page looks like?

 

[J-Wholesale]

Thanks for the response guys. Being a non IT person, I kind of have an idea about the layout and how I would like the website to work, but was curious as to what you meant by a detailed spec...

Would this mean literally detailing how every page works ie what button does what etc? not really sure whre to start when talking to a web developer, as in do I just tell them the detailed business plan and what I would like website to do, or should I even say draw out in powerpoint what each page looks like?

You don't need to go that far initially, but take this from your initial post:

1) Retailer lists the number and price of the goods on MB, together with a brief description and pictures. They are able to update this whenever they want.

What exactly does the retailer have in his control panel for a single item:

1. Is html allowed in his description?
2. Is markup allowed?
3. How many pictures?
4. Large or small or both?
5. Where are the pictures stored, your server or externally?
6. Can the retailer say where the pcitures appear in the listing?
7. Can they use photobucket?
8. Can they edit an existing listing?
9. Can they put a listing on hold without deleting it?
10. Can the offer discounts for more than one purchase?
11. Can they list items in categories?
12. Who creates categories?
13. If categories exist, can items exist in more than one, and can they be moved between categories?
14. How are listings sorted, and which appears in the list first?
15. I could go on all night here...

This is all from what you initially call "a brief description" and everything on this list costs time and money. Your initial spec needs to list everything you want, because if you don't, your quotes could be based on only 10% of the actual work.

 

[J-Wholesale]

Just to add, a web developer could draw up this spec for you, in consultation with you of course, but it would take a lot of time, and you should expect to be charged for it, irrespective of whether you go with them for the entire project.

You're not asking for a brochure site or a basic eCommerce site, your site needs to be designed and written from the ground up, so it's a big undertaking.

 

[altwebdesign]

Just to add, a web developer could draw up this spec for you, in consultation with you of course, but it would take a lot of time, and you should expect to be charged for it, irrespective of whether you go with them for the entire project.

You're not asking for a brochure site or a basic eCommerce site, your site needs to be designed and written from the ground up, so it's a big undertaking.

fully agree.
A spec for this will run into pages and i would eastimate around 10 days of work. Of course you could draw up a simple brief and outline yourself of the key features and pages/navigation, then send it to a developer who will reply with questions regarding your spec and help develop it into a full website spec section by section

 

[anditucker]

We can develop this type of software or website according to your needs. Please go to the addonsolutions [dot] com for more information and get to know about our capabilities. I'll PM my business ID IF you want more information about us and discuss your project details.

 

[wykthorr]

Hmm, quite a project you have there. I remember working on something similar, but I eventually dropped it because at the time there was little market request for it.

It did though take me a few months to get it where it was and there was plenty of stuff still to be done. Make sure you go for a company that's done more on the side of web development rather than web design. This is more of a web application than a website. There are a lot of tricky parts to be done and a lot of security issues to consider. The web developer will have to understand these things very well.

 

[FreelanceSoftwareDeveloper]

There is certainly a few key areas that require consideration as you have already identified.

Whether you process the transaction or just merge feeds will make a big difference to the development cost, and i'm sure a big difference to the business plan behind it.

Feel free to PM me if you would like to discuss this in more detail. Customised ecommerce is our main business.

 

[Astaroth]

Coming to a medium sized project like this as someone who has a background in business project management we would expect a set of "business requirements" to be drawn up (this is something that you do). These are not solutions but what you want the site to do (functional requirements) and effectively service level agreements (non-functional requirements).

From these an architect/ system designer can look at it and start to see what the solution looks like. This can lead to more questions (like the do you want users to be able to add HTML) and there is an itterative approach of getting the business requirements and technical specification up to the conclusion.

From the technical solution the low level design can be created which is what the programmers use to know what each individual model is and what it should do etc.

As you can appreciate this is both time consuming and thus also somewhat costly but ultimately it is better to get things nailed down to start with than have something very wooley and 1 week before launch date you see your new site and its nothing close to what you were thinking of. The closer you can get the requirements to "correct" first time the better for everyone. There are specialists in requirement writing you can hire or you can also look at UML as use case modeling is a good disiplin to try and make sure you have identified and covered off all the "what ifs".