Custom cart costs

[RCarpadus]

We are looking to have a set of carts developed for a multi website project and would like to get an idea of what custom carts have cost people out there. The reason for custom as opposed to out of the box is primarily being able to fully customize the look and feel of the cart and have it perfectly match the website.

We also want to be able to have features that many of the carts out there have but don't seem to be offered in the same cart. We like some features of Cart32 for example that are not available say in OScart which also has some features we like that are not available in Zen Cart etc, etc.

What have you paid to have a custom cart developed and what was it done in (asp/php/.net/whatever)?

I'm not looking for bids or developers (yet), just what you have paid somebody else to do the workor what you would charge on an average.

[jestep]

The cost of something like this totally depends on the features that you want, and how complex of an administration system you need, and who actually designs it for you.

The cost could be anywhere from a few hundred dollars, to well into the thousands depending on these factors.

We ended up developing our own cart system for pretty much the same reasons that you have, and we have absolutely no regrets about it.

Something that you need to look for when choosing someone to design the cart for you, is to make absolutely sure that they agree to make it the way you want it. As stupid as it sounds, I have known several people that have outsourced shopping carts only to get a customized oscommerce product back. We outsourced a cart for another website, and a similar occurrence happened. Just make sure you trust your designer.

[RCarpadus]

Thanks for the info, We definitely are going to pay attention to what we get. What did it cost you to do your cart if you don't mind me asking?

[jestep]

It was developed inhouse, so im not sure what the exact price would be. It's pretty much an ongoing process. If we think of features we need, we program them into the cart. We dont use a fancy back-end management system, so this would reduce the cost quite a lot, but someone would have to be trained to add products or make changes to things, etc. We recently added a paypal payment method, and a coupon discount option. It normally takes us about 3 - 4 hours to make a module and integrate it into the website.

I would guess that our cart as-is would cost in the neighborhood of $1500 for programming and integration. With a more robust back-end management system, I would add another $300 - $800 depending on how complex and how user friendly you want it.