How much work in installing?

[Bear47]

A potential customer who was planning on using a third party for shopping cart/billing, now wants to put simple eCommerce on his site. I have been recommended to look at osCommerce, but I have no experience with it. I need to give him a quote for the cost of doing this.

 

I have never built an eCommerce site, but I have experience in writing my own PHP/mySQL scripts. I mostly do custom programming, rather then just web site design.

 

I have provided him an estimate on the web site, I just need to make a guess on how many hours it would take to learn the basics of osCommerce and integrate it into the site.

 

The site will have 25 to 50 products, the product will change 10%-20% every month. The products are custom made, so a easy way of warning of low inventory would be nice.

 

Customer will pay either through PayPal, or if by credit card, then an order will go to the factory, who will phone the customer to get the credit card number and authorization.

 

The ability to handle pricing in US or Canadian dollars would be desirable.

 

If anyone would care to make a rough estimate in hours it would be appreciated. Since I won't be able to bill him for the learning curve, an estimate in dollars of what would be a reasonable charge would be nice.

[Guest]

if your server has fantastico you can install osCommerce in less than 5 minutes, then just the custom graphics, etc. all depends upon how much work you want to do and your skills. anywhere from 1 hour to 100 hours, all depends upon the work you want to do.

[Jack_mcs]

For someone experienced with oscommerce, a few hours would probably be enough. For a first timer, 3-4 weeks if you catch on fast and depending on the qaulity of the finished site you want. You can unzip oscommerce, install it and it will do almost all of what you want out of the box. But there are problems, or shortcomings, in the basic code that need to be fixed by installng contributions (code changes). There is no way for anyone to judge how long it will take you to learn how to install a contribution. And this doesn't even touch on modifying the appearance of the site.

 

With your background you are more than capable of doing the job. It really just depends on how fast you learn. If your customer is going to give you a deadline, make it for as long as possible. You will probably need it. Depending on what he is willing to pay, it might be best for you to pay someone to do the work for you until you get up to spped.

 

Jack