Apologies if this is wrong place to post, totally new to this but looking to change that asap. Our company has been working with a developer for a few years now. Positive relationship overall. We’re pleased with how our site looks, but it has the most basic ecommerce component to it (WP + woocommerce). For most of our business, customers have to call to get a quote or visit our store in person. We only do a flat fee for shipping, so if your purchase was $1 or $10,000, the shipping was always $9.99. It sounds weird, but it’s just the nature of what we sell (being a bit vague here on purpose).
We’ve been revamping our business to accommodate a more ecommerce-focused site. The developer said, sure, but we should redesign the whole site while we’re at it. That was fine with us and the cost of the redesign (new WP theme) + more ecommerce (‘enhanced cart’ + ‘variable shipping’) seemed reasonable (\~$4K). We have about 900 items in our inventory.
The developer said as long as we’re at it, how about they take over the domains + hosting too, matching the price we were paying with our previous provider. We said sure. We now pay our developer:
(9) domains: $150/yr – most of these domains point to our site, a couple of them don’t go anywhere, but we may use them someday for something else
(2) commercial email accounts: $200/yr
(1) website hosting for 12 months: $250/yr
Total: $600/year, but they make small tweaks to the site throughout the year, keep it updated, keep the plugins updated, answer our questions w/o asking for more $. We value long-term partners over short-term vendors. Our developer was going through a tough time with some life changes and we wanted to respect that. However, it’s been 11 months since we agreed to the redesign and it’s not live. There’s always something. Migrating a whole inventory of 900 products required a lot more work than they thought.
\- What do you all think of these costs for the current site? Are we paying too much?
\- What do you think about the delay with the new site migration?
\- Should we be exploring other options?
Feeling a bit trapped because we’re in deep with the domains and hosting, etc. Thank you.
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Just confirming the hosting is only $250 per year? That insanely low, esp since it includes maintenance.
$600 per year for all of that is a bargain.
Of course this all depends on what country, state, region you’re in.
$600 a year isn’t bad, but I would charge you an all in one rather than doing that piecemeal. Hosting sounds cheap for a site with 900 products. Do you have a lot of traffic?
As for the site not being delivered. 900 products sound a lot but you can easily mitigate issues with this by exporting to spreadsheets or linking google sheets.
At the most that should have been a month long project, WooCommerce will support variable products and plugins will add support for more complicated shipping issues.
I’d honestly be more concerned with that timeline rather than the price per year which is more than reasonable.
Is it drugs?
Dude, good developer can make $600 a day, this is like $75 / h which is ok price, and you are paying that much for a year of hosting, support and updates and wondering did you overpaid ?
And I wouldn’t do 4k for Woo site with 900 products for sure.
So for price part he is super cheap, and I am not sure you could go any cheaper.
Now for update and redisign part it is super weird:
– there is not much to migrate really, if you are going WP to WP site, he just put a new custom theme or paid theme and redesign layout, the products are already there.. It is not like he need to manually move them somewhere one by one.
– 11 month and not a single update from him. ? not even a design preview or anything ?
I would be open with him, since you are working for a long time and tell him, use nicer words these are just an example:
Hey we need a new website soon, we have been waiting for you for a year now, and if you cannot do it in next month we will be going to different developer, you have 5 days to deliver a development plan with dates of deliveries or we are going…
That aside, be prepared that if you move that site develop to another guy that you should also move everything else because you don’t want him to have control over your data and sites no longer.