The Daily Dinar

The Wall Street Journal have a piece about building an e-commerce website and how costs might be kept down for startups or businesses just entering the marketplace.

Hiring a Web developer to build an e-commerce site from scratch can cost at least $5,000, and often far more. But there are cheap alternatives for those willing to do much of the setup themselves — many of which don’t require much time or technical savvy.

They go on to list some possibilities, such as TemplateMonster and some of the canned e-commerce solutions offered by large ISPs and domain registration services. There are, however, a lot more options for people looking to get their websites up quickly and cheaply.

Here’s some of them:

1. For logos and graphics design, including templates, DesignOutpost is one of our favourites. After depositing some money into an escrow account, via PayPal, you can create a brief on their forum and have people ‘bid’ for it. They submit their logos and designs, and you provide feedback and suggestions, going through a few iterations until you decide on one that you like. The process isn’t tightly controlled, there are some top quality designers there, and the end result is often cheaper and much better than had one engaged just one design firm and relied on the creativity of one designer. If you are willing to pay more, there is also LogoWorks, recently acquired by HP.

2. For all sorts of non-graphics design work, such as programming or even data entry, there are sites that specialise in matching buyers with providers on a project-by-project basis. For example, guru.com, elance.com and rentacoder.com are some of the more popular ones. Guru seems to be the most expensive, followed by elance and then rentacoder. Of these, we recommend elance. The good thing about these systems is that they provide an escrow service and a dispute resolution service. You specify the project, developers bid on them, you choose the one you like and then the project is broken into a set of agreed milestones with payment to be made at various points of the project. If you specifically want PHP work done, then scriptlance.com is also worth looking at. Keep in mind that you can post your project to more than one but some of them may impose penalties if you cancel after your advertisement has expired or within a few days of its expiry.

3. If you have some tasks that you need done, then also consider Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. MTurk allows people (requestors) to define tasks that computers just cannot do — such as describing photographs or transcribing podcasts — and pay on completion. There is a tremendous amount of potential in this and it extends far beyond merely getting your business online. MTurk could actually form the backbone of one’s business by allowing you to outsource tasks to its many members at a fixed price. If you are happy to pay an hourly rate, then oDesk might also be appropriate for you.

4. There are a number of forums that may also be useful. Sitepoint and DigitalPoint are two of the biggest and most popular. Both provide marketplaces where people can advertise for all sorts of web-related work such as web development, search engine optimisation or business advice. They are often cheaper than the online freelancing systems as there are no transaction costs and the people are more willing to take on smaller projects. The downside, of course, is that you might have to forgo the security of an escrow system.

5. And last but not least, you can outsource all of your business tasks, such as research, analysis, accounting and market analysis to Indians using the popular Brickwork India.  Using this service, one can find highly qualified people willing to do work for often a fraction of the cost one might pay in the West.  There is also Your Man In India.