estimate time for setting up custom cart

There are several steps to setting up a Product Cart Site:
1. Purchase and install Product Cart on your web server. The PC User's Guide has complete details on this but basically you create a site, FTP all files to your site, run a SQL script to create the empty datbase (if using SQL vs. Access), set folder permissions on the site, and run the setup.
Estimated Time: 30 minutes - 1 hour

2. Setup of site design by modifying header.asp and footer.asp:
Once you understand how Product Cart works, it usually takes 1-2 hours to integrate a design into the header and footer. Starting out the first time it may take you 2-4 hours but it is not complicated and the sample that comes with Product Cart has most features built in, you just change that design to match your design.

3. Setup of Control Panel info. The Product Cart control panel comes installed as a fully functional area for you and your client to maintain all aspects of the Product Cart site. You need to setup things like Company info, Emails, Display settings, Shipping, Payment and Tax info and of course your product categories and products. The basic setup of information takes about 30 minutes to an hour.

4. Product Entry: Assuming you already have product images and content, it probably takes about 3 minutes per product to setup a product once you have done a few products. If you have to create product images and content, of course that would take longer. Also, if you have product options or custom/search fields or are using the apparel add-on that involves more work. We usually give our clients an Excel spreadsheet where they enter their product information and we use Product Cart to import their product information and upload the pictures. If you are manually entering products, PC has a built in image sizer so you upload the largest image and it will auto-generate and resize the thumbnail, detail and enlarged images.

If you have not tried out the Product Cart demos, you should since you can walk through the whole control panel and try out all of the things you would need to do, especially creating product categories and products. (http://www.earlyimpact.com/productcart/demo.asp) In our opinion, the Product Cart Control Panel is by far the best and easiest to use of any ecommerce application we have ever worked with and all of our clients say the same thing.

You should also skim through the User's Guide which is very helpful:
http://www.earlyimpact.com/productcart/support/index.asp#man uals

In Product Cart you won't need to create all of the different pages manually, you create categories and products and PC handles displaying the category pages and product detail pages for you. So once you have an idea of how long it takes to setup one product, just multiple that by the number of products you have to setup and you have a ballpark time estimate.

4. Training your client: It usually takes 2-3 hours to train the client on the PC Control Panel. If the client is not technical at all it may take a little longer. We usually do to different training sessions. One when the site is setup and the design is implemented to show them how to setup categories and products and manage content pages and then another session after products are created to show them how the ordering process works and how to process orders and manage other areas of the site.

I hope this helps!

  when you say "We usually give our clients an Excel spreadsheet where they enter their product information and we use Product Cart to import their product information and upload the pictures."

so if we have the Excell sheet- this replaces having to enter each product manually? is this correct?


Edited by Ceylan - 04-August-2006 at 12:37pm

MarkCoyle wrote: For me the time wasn't in setting up the store itself (allow half a day), it was in the store configuration to fit our preferences, setting up the categories and moving the product descriptions into Product Cart. cheers Mark

so how long di it take you to set up categories and moving the product descriptions?

I have 2 categories and 137 products

Hi

I do my work on the site at night, so it's hard to given an estimate of unbroken time.

For configuration of the store - probably 2-3 hours plus ten minutes here and there as I learn more and add features.

Modifying the CSS files (assuming you're in v3) - half a day, there are a lot of codes to work through.

Setting up the categories - for me it was probably four hours, but then I have 400 products and many categories to enable finding the products in different ways.  For you obviously much less (but having 70 or so items to a category might require some breaking into sub-categories in the future).

Moving the product descriptions - well my descriptions are full reviews with a flash mp3 player, web URLs etc so it took a while as I was transferring HTML/flash layouts.   Doing this for 400 products took a long time - probably something like 30 hours but I had a very specifc requirement.   If you are just moving text and graphics, far less time than mine.

One aspect it's hard to quantify is becoming familiar with the store admin - it's really doing worth this before you do anything else.  Spend a few hours reading the user guide two or three times, have a play at the admin area before doing anything real.  It will pay dividends later on.

It's tempting to estimate down to hours for such projects, but in my experience you will need a block of time to set-up/configure/enhance/integrate/test/refine - for a commercial project you should be looking at sets of days, possibly around a week depending on your experience.

If you need to do custom ASP coding on the store and you're not expert in that area, either you'll end up subcontracting it or spending a lot of time.  That's a luxury I have as my store is accountable only to myself and a partner, but for others that might not be possible.

I hope this helps.

cheers
Mark

This forum rocks! thanks for all the info it eally helps

I have been reading the user guise for version 2.76 and will probably read it through again... and again- I assume verion 3 won't be too different - pc said they'd  have the user guide V3 ready end of August. I may have to start job way before.

I think it may be a good idea to pay  Early Impact to do the installation/setup

although I 'm always for having more control and knowledge.






Edited by Ceylan - 04-August-2006 at 2:16pm