> OK, folks, here's a *challenge*. ;-))
> 
> I have a week to build an online store from scratch.

Build, or build-test-deploy?

> Is this do-able? If so, how?

It wholly depends on what type of store. If there are five products sold singly it will be a lot easier than ten thousand products sold in any quantities with non-linear discount scales based on quantity of purchase.

I have done such a thing in the past. I started off with a week to do it and an Actinic (sp?) license. Actinic turned out not to be flexible enough to elegantly do what the client wanted, so I wrote my own store from scratch. I over-ran by about three days and two of the nights during this period I worked all the way through. For all my hard work I ended up looking bad because of the over-run. This was my own fault for agreeing to do  it in the first place, and I will never do anything like this again. The money was very good, but nothing can make up for that kind of stress IMHO.

Figure out how much time it will take you to do it, and treble it for the quote. If you're using an off the shelf solution, think in terms of a few days to learn it. This will factor up to about a week an a half in your timeline before you start putting the actual store together. If you're writing it yourself, you wouldn't want to be writing any code for the first week; let alone completing the project. There are (somewhat obviously) major security issues with online stores, so adequate planning and design are absolutely required.

HTH

Regards

Chris Marsh
