What should I charge? Whats the going rate?

[motorads]

Hello,

I want to know what an e-commerce site would go for. I would like to know what to charge for something like this..

The web design
The e-commerce section which will have a shopping cart, and features such as accounts that will have different prices for each product. So, each account will be different.

For Example... Account #1 would have a certain product at about $5.00 and Account #2 would have a certain product at about $10.00. Also, these accounts are users. So each account/user would have a login username and password.

I would like to know what the best language would be to do this in. Would php & mySQL be best? OR would CGI/Perl & mySQL be best?

This will have about 2,000 accounts and quite a bit of products on it.

I would be doing the maintance on it including but not limited to adding/editing the accounts. Updating the site with different products and prices.

I would like to know what the going rate would be to make the site for one, with the web design and the E-Commerce section. Also, I would like to know what the going to rate would be for the maintance.

All opinions are apprciated greatly.


Thank you

Brian
Bmeyer@motorads.com

[Jason]

The rate that you charge depends greatly on your skills as a designer. Some sites can get away with charging enormous rates for web design, and some are worth it. Some true Photoshop experts can get away with selling an original creation for $1500-$2000, while average designers may charge only a few hundred, or even less.

Programming is a different story. Are you programming the cart yourself or using open source code? DO you have an existing product that you will use over and over again? Does it have a variety of features and whistles?

Currently the most popular language is (or is at least fast becoming) PHP. So if you are looking for product popularity, PHP would be the way to go.

If you'd like some ball park figures, as a complete set for webdesign and a cart/commerce solution I'd charge between $500 - $1500 depending on how confident you are with your skills and abilities and how advanced the system is.