Ecommerce Experiment

We are lucky to already have a web developer on board for this project (me ), but if we didn’t have this experience in house, then we would need to look elsewhere. Choosing a web developer will depend quite heavily on your budget, expectations and the scale of your operation.

Once you know what your budget is, what you expect/what from the web developer and you know just how big the site will be, and then you will need to go out and find a web developer. This could be anyone from a freelancer, to a small web company, to a much larger web company, and this decision mostly will depend on your budget. Most importantly you need to be sure that the developer you choose is capable of handling the work and will be able to help you grow.

Here are our guidelines for how we feel a company or individual should go about looking for someone to develop their new eCommerce site.

1. Work out a realistic budget for what you would like to spend on the development work
2. Work out what your expectations/requirements for the web developer are. (This could be anything from custom stock integration to a specific payment provider).
3. Determine how big your site will be (in terms of products and visitors), as this will determine the right software and systems to use for your site.

After this, you should have a good idea in your mind of what sort of web developer you require. When choosing between a freelancer, a small company or a large company, it is necessary to keep in mind your requirements now, but also your future requirements:

A freelancer would be an ideal low cost solution initially, however as your company grows and the workload increases, it may lead to them having to pass the work onto a small company in order to better facilitate your requirements. By this I mean that they might not have the current capacity to handle your increasing workload and they may not want to grow larger than being just freelance.

A large company would be a very expensive solution initially, but they would be able to handle the growth and would possibly have more experience in dealing with large projects and be able to help you grow your business quickly in a well thought out manner.

A small company would not be the cheapest solution, but they would also bring to the table the capacity to grow alongside your new ecommerce business.

Once you have these sorted out, you need to then choose a web developer, it is best to approach a number of different companies/people and get quotes from all three.

• Ask to see examples of their previous work.
• Ask if you can speak to some of their current clients to see what they think.
• Ask them what makes them stand out above all the rest and what sort of technology will they be using to run your site.
• Ask them how they would intend to host your site, as you want to make sure they are using a secure solution that is backed up every day with the backups being kept for at least a week.
• Make sure you tell them as much detail about your project as possible and ensure they have an exact specification to work to when calculating a quote or writing a proposal for you.
• When you get a proposal back from the company, read it carefully and watch out for hidden terms and conditions and ensure that everything you want is in the proposal. As anything not specifically written in the proposal document is 99% of the time, not included in the price.

Golden Rule: It is important to remember that the cheapest option is not always the most sensible option (“pay peanuts, get monkeys“). However, it is still important to remember that big companies will charge more because they have more overheads involved.

It is also prudent to make sure you are not paying for a ‘big brand’ company to work on your site, when they might not necessarily do anything different to a smaller brand company.

I’m not saying here that you should throw away your money, but you must make sure that the decision you make is not solely based on cost, but is a compromise of quality and keeping costs within your budget.