How much would one expect to pay to have an auction website built that provides the same capabilities as eBay?
When talking about a big site the price can be anything from 1000 to 1 000 000+. It all depends on how it will act under heavy load, how good the code will be, what features there will be etc.
If you are on a budget, There are a few pre-built auction websites you can use. A quick Google search would be your friend.
I have seen cookie cutter auction site offers but I am unimpressed. I would be more comfortable having a dedicated development team adress some specific needs that I have. Would you expect a site that has the same user friendly functions like eBay to be achievable for under $20,000?
Thanks for the feedback. It will need a user profile component with feedback capability, secure payment processing and of course the ability for a user to initiate an auction. A ballpark figure…under 20k?
If you can’t find a open source solution or paid one that fits most of your criteria than you would be looking at several months of custom development work. The best thing to do would be to document from a user perspective what specific features are required. Than also list less important features. The more detailed brief of the project which you can supply to a development company/individual the more accurate a quote will be. Simply saying something like Ebay could really mean anything. I would estimate though that it would cost 60K – 100K for a reliable, experienced and legit company to take the project on. You might be able to get away with the 20K if you where to use a CMS system like Joomla or Drupal as base for the system. Though you would need to make sacrifies in performance and usability to do so in comparison to ground-up development.
Thanks oddz. Joomla appears to have some extensions that would satisfy some of my core needs. Being unfamiliar with programming and web development I am curious how to go about setting things in motion. I have already purchased the domain name I plan to use. Could you outline the necessary steps needed to get this project up and running?
I’d have a chat with some studios/agencies and see if they will pick it up. $20,000 if your expectations aren’t AAA & it doesn’t have to be a literal feature clone may well be achievable.
But I’d talk to some experienced studios/agencies.
if you dont expect it to operate thousands orders per day it should be achievable within 20k, however, yet again, if the project is big it also got ongoing maintenance, testing, updating etc costs so dont forget to factor that in as well. Like today you have something that works but tomorrow your payment system issue some api or certificate changes and you got quite some work to do again. If you expect a minor amount of users (like niche auction) i d go for premade solutions, the support on those is usually more reliable compared to the chance of studio going broke in 2 years for example.
ebay is too costly, group of professional web developer are into it dedicated to different aspect of the website…it would be difficult to handle such huge site and there are many application to it, its above $20,000 but exact figure you have to ask them, nobody knows the exact cost here