I’ve been asked to build a website for a local company who are looking to update their old tired looking site that they have at the moment. That’s no problem, all they wanted was the design revamped and the option to add 50 or so items to a shopping cart. Easy enough and a fee for developing a site based on this was agreed.

Now I’ve been sent an excel spreadsheet of products that they want to sell on the site. . . . . 7 thousand items[u]!

I’m happy building simple websites and use the wix.com editor but the shear amount of work involved in creating product pages for all of these must be astronomical. Has any one any idea of how much it would usually cost to build a site like that?

As an example this is the sort of site they are now thinking of – http://www.caledoniasigns.co.uk/ – note the gigantic array of products!

Thanks in advance!

7 thousand items or 7 thousand options? Maybe 50 items of multiple sizes?

Buy a shopping site, skin it up and get them to load the data would be my choice!

Most off the shelf shopping sites have some sort of automated upload from a csv etc I’d assume?

woocommerce allows you to upload by .csv if you’re ok with WordPress

Someone with more experience of this sort of thing will be along in a minute, but as a starter Google e-commerce templates / solutions.

Buy a shopping site, skin it up and get them to load the data would be my choice!

This except I’d offer to do the data manipulation too as it’s

a) Nice for the client to just hand a load of stuff over and have it all dealt with.

b) Money for old rope. The simplest (and dullest) part of the project.

Looking at your Caledonia Signs example, you’ll need to import the products and product categories into the website and then use some sort of faceted search to do the expanding list on the right hand side. It’s not hard to do and shouldn’t take too long.

I can do that kind of thing in Drupal early in next year if interested? I’ll even work with you and teach you as you go along, if you like.

Rachel

So if you did one item how long would it take, 3mins? So that would be 20 an hour.
350hrs in total just for the manual input of the products.

350hrs = 8 weeks (continuous) work.

So how much do you charge per week or per hr.

There is not necessarily any difference between a site that sells 7 products and one that sells 7,000. As long as it can handle the categories, options, sizes, colours, stuff like that, then you’re good to go. Products can be imported directly from the spreadsheet. Images can usually be matched by product SKUs.

As said, there’s some off the shelf solutions that will probably manage it. Magento. OpenCart. Etc. Though I’m not too familiar with them myself. That would be the easiest/cheapest option.

Somewhere in the region of £5k probably wouldn’t be far off in terms of cost if you were to have it built. + or – depending how bespoke.

What butcher says ^

Thanks that’s all really useful. I’ve never used an e commerce template before and am not sure how it would fit with wix. Will have a look tomorrow.

As said – lots of items doesn’t make the site any more complicated, if you have a proper database – it just means a lot of data entry.

Ok so I had a bit of a look at how this can be done with wix but there still seems to be a fair bit of work involved.

I can upload a csv by adding a Shopify app. I have an excel spreadsheet that can be saved as csv but is not in the correct style for shopify which would mean I’d have to edit the 7k files in the excel document first.

Do different e commerce sites have different ways of importing csv files. Perhaps my excel spreadsheet was designed for use on a specific one?

There’s always going to be a need to adjust either the expectations of the website software to accommodate the spreadsheet or adjust the spreadsheet to accommodate the expectations of the website software, whichever one you choose.

Without seeing the spreadsheet, it’s difficult to speculate which is the best option in your case. Remember, though, that Excel is pretty powerful and you can apply changes against many rows at once.

All the ecommerce solutions I can think of would look for named columns in the spreadsheet and ignore other things in there, which should make life easier. Use (text manipulation) formulae!

Presumably, with 7000 products (did we work out if this was products or product options in the end?) you will need to provide a fairly good environment in which someone can manage the products, prices etc.

Rachel