e-commerce sites. Bit of impartial advice needed.

Hi all,

Just wondered if the collective brain could give me a few pointers.

My Mrs has an online store that sells ladies wear and accesories. It's been going for years and all the sales and e-commerce stuff is handled by a big outside company that deals with photography, logistics etc. It's all very good but there's quite a few reasons why we need to build our own e-commerce site. We'll still sell through that channel but we want to now have our own store we can control and update etc.

We're about to put some proper effort into it now as the kids are off to nursery etc. so we have the time. It does OK as is considering how little time and attention it gets but it's now time to see what it can (or possibly can't..) do.

We need to commision someone to build the site and probably do some UX and design. I have a design background, can do wireframes etc. but I appreciate my limits.

I've been told by a few folks we should be looking into Magento, which I have at a superficial level.

I have the feeling the programmer we usually use isn't quite up to what we need here so rather than sticking a pin in the magento partners list or something similar I thought I'd just ask. And see if I get.

Anyone have any recommendations? Any idea of what sort of cost we'd be looking at? What should I be looking for?

Any help appreciated and repaid in a beer if I see you out somewhere.

Ta all,
B.

My lady friend recently set up her own business and went through this process.

I had various quotes from Magento specific designers, with the intention of using their ecommerce platform, but I found that the quotes I got were crazy in comparison to getting something built and designed for use in Shopify.

Maybe that was just my experience, maybe I chanced upon the wrong Magento dudes, or just really good ones who could quote high because they're always busy - i'm not sure.

If you want to know figures for what we ended up paying for build and design and use of shopify drop me a private message.

Thanks for that, I will do.

B.

Magneto site is going to cost 15-20k to do well.

Shopify is pretty good and by the sounds of it, exactly what you need.

I'm in the early stages of planning an online shop for my GFs website, I was thinking of setting up my own using something like opencart, but I'm coming round to using someone like Shopify. I'll have less hassle with the set up and the idea of integration with FB is also appealing.

15 - 20k sounds steep compaired to the costs that I know others have paid for similar magento sites but i'll bare it in mind. I have a good friend who paid about 7 and thinks it's amazing and he got plenty for his money.

Shopify seems pretty good but the look isn't quite right for us. I can see it's perfect for some shops and brands but i don't think it's for us.

The more I research this stuff the more confusing it gets. We're a bit past the 'selling as a sideline' thing and we make money already so we don't mind paying a bit but 20K is eyewatering. Mind you, even that pales next to how much it used to cost us to run a shop so I guess it's relative.

Anyone got any developers they've used and can recommend?

B.