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Nick
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 16 Jun 2004
Posts: 11802
Location: Sydney, NSW
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I can't really help you with the front-end web stuff but after going to a bazillion meeting on the technical support side of e-commerce applications, I can cherry-pick some things you need to consider:
1) Before you talk to anyone about developing the site, you need a really detailed brief. You need to have a good idea about the number of products, the categories they fit into, the expected number of customers, the $ turnover per day, the expected growth rate, seasonal variations in traffic, special features (BBS, online support chat, etc) and lots more.
2) there are several different business models you could use:
in-house (high start-up costs but the most control and flexibility) probably not the best choice for a smaller business.
co-located, where you have your own servers in a data centre and use their infrastructure. Also expensive to set up and sometimes high running costs. You really need to check the fine print for the cost of any special services; where I worked, it cost the equivalent of $500 per for a guy to change a backup tape in our co-located gear!)
Shared services, where the data centre owns all the servers and infrastructure and you rent a certain amount of capacity on it to run your own code. This is very popular but you need a very detailed SLA with meaningful penalties if the provider does not meet the service levels. You also need to know what the provider charges for unusual requests like extra capacity, code changes, audits, site visits, etc.
Complete service providers, where you walk in with a business proposal and (in theory) walk out with an e-commerce site. I haven't dealt directly with this type of vendor and I am a bit sceptical. There may be hidden charges for code maintenance, capacity upgrades and all sorts of reoccurring running costs. You need to be sure the vendor is the right size to match your needs; smaller operators may not be able to provide support for rapid growth, while very large vendors may not give smaller customers the attention level and support they need.
3) Security: for any hosted site, you want to know any security reporting, accreditations the vendor can provide. what their policy is on breaches, any penalties they will pay for breaches of your site. That goes for both software and hardware if there are separate vendors.
4) Business continuity and disaster recovery: You want a guaranteed minimum up-time % and in case of hardware failure, a guaranteed recovery time. That should include cutting over to a secondary data centre if you plan to do much business volume. There should also be a well defined backup plan for both the site code and the back-end database.
5) confidentiality agreements for the code development. Where I worked, an Indian development company was found auctioning off some of our proprietary ATM code - we had to sue them for a large damages claim.
6) Intellectual rights: I hear that some full service vendors keep the rights to your site so that you are locked-in to the vendor.
I will probably think of more stuff, this just what came to mind in 10 minutes _________________ Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion
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Fri Oct 17, 2014 8:59 pm |
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Valen
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 4436
Location: Sydney
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I'd suggest that you not worry too much about all the slide in/out gadgets, that kinda stuff makes things expensive and fussy, you need different code for pretty much every browser/OS combo out there, keep the look, but don't bother too much about the chrome.
The most important thing as nick said is a detailed brief.
Most likely with your budget you are going to get an open source product re-skinned, or themed or something like that. If you can sketch out the screens you want to see in some detail it'll help a lot.
Keep in mind that people making the site make their money on you changing your mind.
At the sort of scale you are talking about your website creator is probably going to be your host. You will pay a bit more for this than you would if you hosted it yourself but its probably going to be worth it, (expect something in the $30 a month range, you can get your own VPS for $7 a month) so you don't need to know maintenance.
What is really important though is that you guys buy the domain name, don't buy it through the creator/host, you need to buy it and own it and manage it then you can direct it at the host. Part 2 is make sure you get a copy of the source code and get the whole website running on something you own/control at least once. When the hosting/creation business goes tits up you don't want them taking your website with them. If you own the domain and you can re-create the website if your provider dies or your host kicks it you can be back up and running in a matter of hours.
Perhaps ask if you can get the backups of your site sent to you, or if you can get access to take your own backups just in case (I'm mostly thinking database here).
I'm estimating you would probably be up for something in the $5-10K range for that kinda thing and you will get a front-end for something like oscommerce or perhaps a joomla/wordpress/whatever skin plugging into some commerce engine.
I'd specify though that you want to get a minimum standard of say 90/100 in google pagespeed particularly in server response time as that has an impact on your page rankings and the user experience. Plenty of times these guys will make a website that looks ok, but it'll load like a dog. Try it on a slow adsl connection or busy 3g service then ctrl+shift+R on it to see what its like for a first time visitor to your site, the slower it loads the less likley customers are to put their credit card info into your site.
Make sure they don't have java that hits google and twitter and all that crap if you aren't actually using said services, half the time they are just there by default and they don't take them out, then your page will hang on loading until it hits a twitter server for no reason.
Specify responsiveness as part of your spec, people don't trust slow websites. _________________ Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets
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Sat Oct 18, 2014 8:43 am |
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