Seriously now all I wanna do is complain, complain and complain.

I feel so stupid. This client of mine, sought a web developer (I'm told that he's a random dude, and not much connection at all) and the dude quoted them a sum, let's put a alphabetical value to it just for confidentiality purposes, of $abc.00 lah. And so this client wanted to meet up with me a few days later and proposed, discussed, etc. So I said I can do a CMS (Content Management System) for you so you can easily update your products yourself. and so I quoted them like, almost $abc.00 x2.


(then of course lah I sit at home there praying and waiting praying waiting waiting praying)


They were quiet for a few days and suddenly I heard from a common friend of this client that I'm charging extremely high in comparison to the previous web developer that they sought. Now comes the stupid part. Being me, I contacted them and said well okay, I'll lower my quote to $abc.00 then. And they said okay.

Now comes the even stupider part. I asked the client for the previous web developer's contact just to ask what specifications he was going to provide. And turns out that he was only going to do a few basic static pages for them, no automated updating system, no e-commerce, no shopping cart, no feedback form. NO SHIT. I could do that rubbish in TWO DAYS. and if you'd like to know, $abc.00 can almost buy you a laptop. And here I am, taking a week to do a fully automated e-commerce system that allows you to:

• track sales levels and inventory count
• track your customer base - all customer information will be recorded
• easily add/update products
• add variations to individual products for e.g. colour (blue, black, red), size (XS, S, M, L), etc
• track customer ratings of popular products
• issue coupon codes for customers to key in upon checkout for discounts
• enable bulk discounts if customer purchases large quantities (eg. 1-10pieces RM10.00/item, 11-20pieces RM8/item, etc)
  
• auto-respond to customer transactional statuses like order received, payment accepted, job dispatched
• converts currency to preferred currency if customer is not dealing with the local currency of the merchant
  
• link the shopping cart with PayPal, Chronopay, Google Checkout and standard credit card
• automate shipping cost calculations based on incremental weight, incremental total price, regional destination or flat shipping rate
• automatically retrieve packing slip information for printing and packaging upon dispatching the products
• do many more things
  

Anyway long story short. My point is that clients should keep all their stakeholders happy INCLUDING their webmasters. Because I'd like to believe that for online boutiques, the concept is simple. No website, NO BUSINESS. zero. zilch. nil. kosong.

Maybe now I should just be less stupid and less desperate for a job, just stick to my quotation, and don't try and be nice and be cheap labour for other people. I mean honestly, RM2500 for a job that takes a week isn't very unreasonable right?