Current pricing trends for ecommerce sites ?

I have done some research in this area, and the prices vary.

The sites that I have done, have commanded every little compared to the average.

What would a ball park figure be for a fully customized e-commerce site ? Including SSL certificate, payment options and a client friendly admin e-commerce site, full SEO, and the rest ?

A 500 page deep site, completely unique, with a open source e-commerce package, SEO on a monthly basis, a advertising plan and administration.

Is $2000 to much to ask ? Clients get what they pay for, but $2000 seems very low in relation to the work provided.

I recently did a site which cost around $900, the client made their money back within a short period of time, and has many new leads and sales from the creation of site. The client was happy with the product and service provided.

Any insight would be highly appreciated.

@TruthConquers: Impossible to say - there are too many variables, such as choice of payment gateway (and therefore the integration work involved); how easy the e-commerce software is to customize; degree of customization required; who's doing the work; how fast/well they work; customer's budget; and what other overheads might be involved.

If you're already familiar with a given e-commerce package then it should be possible to design and set up a basic store in just a few hours.

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Thanks for the insight, and charging for design and putting all the products into the database (of which there are thousands) ?

Does $2000, seem like a lot, providing a original site layout, uploading all the products, SEO and the rest ? Since a well worked site which a proper advertising will recoup the main cost within a short space of time.

I saw some templates with a (buy-out option) going for $2500, including all the original files, this of course excluded populating the database and a SEO campaign.

@TruthConquers: Yep, those would be additional costs too. If it was me I would be quoting well over $2K for all that.

My general approach is to suggest to the client that they start with the simplest online store they can get away with, to keep costs down, so that they can test the market. This might even be a Yahoo! Store or similar. Once they've confirmed that there's a market for their product - and they're actually making some income - then they can come back to me for a more expensive bespoke design/build.

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

This is an excellent topic. In the USA, prices have come down over the years, but ad agencies still charge very much. For instance, a friend of mine recently got a proposal from a smallish agency for a Magento eCommerce website. For initial setup and installation of Magento, custom template design and 5 basic (nothing special) products was going to cost $6,600. That was on the east coast. I know agencies on the west coast that charge just as much or more for something similar. The sad thing is, most small and medium ad agencies have let go their web designers because of lack of jobs. So they are just upcharging and then outsourcing the projects anyway overseas.

Increasingly in the US, web projects are getting outsourced overseas which is tough, because it's quite expensive to live in California and New York, so drastically dropping rates makes it very tough. But sites like getacoder.com and similar have made it much easier to find reputable people overseas.

But for small individual designers here in California, the rates seem to be in the $2,500 - $4,000 for ecommerce, again, depending all the variables, level of complexity, etc.