How much should I pay for someone to design me a comparison site?

**hens00** · 09-03-08

I am looking to have a custom made comparison site similar to the likes of mobiles4everyone.com and rightmobiles.co.uk, but I am unsure as to how much I should spend.

I have posted my requirements on various freelancing websites and have had a range of bids - from $800 to $5000. I know that often in life you get what you pay for, but isnt $5000 rather a lot? (Especially when the $5000 bid was from someone in India).

I would be providing an existing template and would require someone to customise it slightly and to sort out all the datafeeds from the mobile phone merchants (about 15 in total). In addition, I would require the site to have some of CMS function.

How much should i realistically expect to pay for such work to be done?

Any recommendations as to who could do this for me?

**bills2big.com** · 09-03-08

I have seem them on other forums for less than $100, so yes it is a lot.

**hens00** · 09-03-08

Yeah prices vary dramatically according to experience and location of these designers. I dont expect to get much of a website for $100 and im prepared to pay a bit more for a quality design.

Im just having difficulty in trying to figure out what is a reasonable amount to pay. Since I do not have any experience in modifying templates or implementing datafeeds, I have no idea how much time and effort is involved.

**Cheapdvds** · 09-03-08

Purchase & Download | Price Tapestry

u wont get any where close to the above for the money

**Cheapdvds** · 09-03-08

in fact , u could probably spend £500 to £1000 and still get no where near the above

**zaq** · 09-03-08

i emailed 2company.co.uk who run the site freecontractmobiles.co.uk and they said it will cost me £8500 for a clone of freecontractmobiles.co.uk and they take 20% commission of the leads you make for them to add 40 odd feeds twice a day.

**hens00** · 09-03-08

£8500??????

Jesus christ, I had no idea that it would cost that much. I assume that the main bulk of the work is in organising the datafeeds? Im not being funny, but for 8500 grand I think that freecontractmobiles.co.uk is lacking in the design quality department?

Well in light of this new information, i feel a bit more comfortable with the bids that were placed for my project. Have managed to narrow it down to 3 companies at around $1000 -1500.

Will they be able to produce what Im after? I certainly hope so. I found the companies via elance.com and they all seem to have excellent credentials and past reviews. I guess I will have to wait and see. Wish me luck.

**zaq** · 09-03-08

i thought the same thing hens00 but you need to look at it as a long term investment and £8500 is a bargain for a site with 40 datafeeds, as for the design you can tell them how you like the site to look like, i think they made it a basic look so it gets listed on google easy and faster as they what the google bots to pick up all the info need to list higher on google but when you take a look at the stats on their site they had "6946 visitors since 08 March 2008" so say 1% earn them a lead thats 69 leads a day and with Dial-a-Phone paying from £40 commission on buyat that works out to £2760+ a day, plus take away 20% for them updating the datafeeds twice a day for you thats £2204+ a day.

So that makes the £8500 a bargain!

**hens00** · 09-03-08

I didnt realise that the feeds needed to be manually updated? I assumed that you could set up the feeds to download new information when it was updated by the merchants? And this will cost you 20% of your sales??? Is it standard practice for developers to take such a high percentage when creating these types of sites?

I know that mobiles4everyone.com and urmob.co.uk have affiliate programmes which allow you to use their datafeeds. By inserting some html code into your site you are given full access of their datafeed mobile phone search tool and for that they charge about 20% of your sales.

I would not have a problem with the 20% if I were using these companies, as obviously I would be paying for the service of the feeds. But for 2company.co.uk to charge you 8500 pounds to design the site AND take a further 20% is crazy.

Surely then a much cheaper option is to sign up with mobiles4everyone or urmob as an affiliate and have a web designer create a website around the datafeed search feature they provide? This would cost much less than 8500 pounds!

**zaq** · 09-03-08

Yeah its news to me too "manually updated" but you need to find out with the networks if their is a easy way, also they not going to make it cheaper for you as you will be taking sales of them lol.

Also you need to take into account they will build you a unique site info and site layout so when google bots checks out your site they dont what it to messup their own google listing, thats why the £8500 fee and 20% fee as they know how much you can earn each month off the compare mobile business sites.

hens00 i see what you mean about mobiles4everyone or urmob but its not good to startup a business just because its cheaper but you have 3 options now etc

1: 2company.co.uk
2: mobiles4everyone.com and urmob.co.uk and web designer to update
3: guy in india

**Rich** · 10-03-08

Since my site has been mentioned I thought I'd put my side forward as someone who provides a comparison service for other affiliates. You can automate the feeds to a point but you have to handle manual updates when a new phone is released or a new free gift or a tariff is added or changed or a new type of offer is added or 101 other factors. Someone needs to put in quite some time to manage the feeds.

1% conversion of visitors into sales is optimistic. People browse for a long time before ordering a phone. That is to say that earnings of that site are probably a fair bit lower.

As far as I can see that company you mention are an affiliate of Mobiles4Everyone so I would wonder if they are offering 80% overall or 80% of what they get from M4E. I don't know what M4E's rates are now as they no longer display them publicly.

Personally I think a 20% share is good value for the amount of work needed to maintain the database. The majority of similar schemes in other areas, where an affiliate provides a service to other affiliates for a share of commission, range from 25% to 50% for the developer.

If you want to try out the UrMob service then have a look at the link in my signature on the site. Futureweb is also working on a script that affiliates can use to create sites from the UrMob datafeed.

**jezaff** · 10-03-08

As a pro developer, I would suggest that designing a full bespoke website with full on CMS system would be a rather significant cost.

If someone is offering a £100 website they are probably selling you something that has already been developed. I'd always recommend using an open source CMS as a starting point as they will include database access classes, security management, etc and then all the functionality such as blogs and forums out of the box.

You then just need someone to knock up a bespoke plugin for your functionality and graphical theme. This is the route I took for knocking up a fully automated feed based site (just for fun, ie hobby based not actually live!). Must admit it took me many hours to create a totally generic mapping system and I specialise in ETL development by profession!

But I guess such packages already exist for sale anyway? If not then maybe there's an opportunity there...

btw, having managed offshore outsourced development teams I would say that if you follow this route make sure your spec is very clear and payments are tied to very well defined deliverables!

Best of luck