Do any of you

[original PM]

Own your own business/e- business?

What I want to know is how long you would expect it to take (from scratch) to get a website up and running where you could sell some of your products and take payment (even if that was via some third party payment gateway)

And does anyone have any examples of what can be achieved in what timescales?

Cheers

Maybe should be in technical?

[eek]

Own your own business/e- business?

What I want to know is how long you would expect it to take (from scratch) to get a website up and running where you could sell some of your products and take payment (even if that was via some third party payment gateway)

And does anyone have any examples of what can be achieved in what timescales?

Cheers

Maybe should be in technical?

If you don't really care what it looks like and are willing to spend a little bit of money on it possibly a day to set up...

[Spacecadet]

I run my own business
Most of my sales come through "middle men". It saves me having to spend time finding, chasing and securing customers. Only downside is having to deal with their lies.

I have a website but its just for show, it never generates any sales.


HTH

[MarillionFan]

I run my own business
Most of my sales come through "middle men". It saves me having to spend time finding, chasing and securing customers. Only downside is having to deal with their lies.

I have a website but its just for show, it never generates any sales.


HTH

Do you still put cards in phoneboxes?

[RedSauce]

Own your own business/e- business?

What I want to know is how long you would expect it to take (from scratch) to get a website up and running where you could sell some of your products and take payment (even if that was via some third party payment gateway)

And does anyone have any examples of what can be achieved in what timescales?

Cheers

Maybe should be in technical?

there are quite a few shopping cart applications which you can buy and some free ones. I've setup nopcommerce for a few people and can usually have a decent shop configured and running within a week. The good thing about it is it is open source and quite well written and so it is fairly easy to create widgets and plugins for bespoke functionality.

[original PM]

If you don't really care what it looks like and are willing to spend a little bit of money on it possibly a day to set up...

Ok but if say you were happy with spending say £50k and waiting 3 months could you get a decent site which offers a good user purchase experience?

[VectraMan]

I think if you're selling just one product, integrating with PayPal can be as easy as including one button on your page.

[eek]

Ok but if say you were happy with spending say £50k and waiting 3 months could you get a decent site which offers a good user purchase experience?

Ye but you could equally well get a tulip one for that money. If you are talking that type of money Venda is probably a decent option.

Either way you want to find the best open source / commercial package and customise. Believe it or not user experience is more about what people are used to rather than new experiences.

As an example of bad practice watching my wife order from vista yesterday was fun.

[original PM]

Ye but you could equally well get a tulip one for that money. If you are talking that type of money Venda is probably a decent option.

Either way you want to find the best open source / commercial package and customise. Believe it or not user experience is more about what people are used to rather than new experiences.

As an example of bad practice watching my wife order from vista yesterday was fun.

Ok cheers for the details -- on the user experience I keep trying to tell the team to stop re-inventing the wheel and look at Amazon etc - as this is how people are used to purchasing on the internet.

But if I gave you 18 months and £1.5 million quid do you reckon you could get me something useful?

[eek]

Ok cheers for the details -- on the user experience I keep trying to tell the team to stop re-inventing the wheel and look at Amazon etc - as this is how people are used to purchasing on the internet.

But if I gave you 18 months and £1.5 million quid do you reckon you could get me something useful?

Oh I could easily. But I would probably be spending most of that optimizing and existing site. You're options are two fold:-

1) develop afresh and hope you usability expert is actually an expert (hint never seen anyone who claims to be one who actually is one).
2) find a customisable package as close to Amazon as possible and then use multi-variant testing, cursor tracking and various other tools to identify what items work and what doesn't. (Hint this is what erro.rs would eventually do as it becomes custome.rs if I wasn't side tracked with clientco and other works).
3) cut your purchase path to be
a) as short as possible
b) as clear as possible
c) don't ask stupid questions. Asos discovered two killer issues a couple of years back so:-

Moved registration to the very end of the form (even then its optional and they just email customers)
Hid the discount field unless the customer came from a site with a valid discount code. Otherwise people just played hunt a discount code and went elsewhere.

Trust me I can bore people on this for days usually until the bill is large enough the developers give in.....