Potential client once asked for a clone of Amazon, for $5000, in one month. I did not take the project.

jokes on you, that was the last project of my degree! a bookstore!

to be fair it was a disaster but for other reasons

But the website itself is terrible. Wrong reviews, fake reviews, prices that change as your progress to payment page, incorrect filtered results. I can imagine the back-end of that website is a dumpster fire. Only holding together because they throw hardware resources at it.

No one understands scale. Not just its impact on throughput but on feature sets. Chances are, your random customer's pet amazon for their 100 person company is in fact a small bespoke web shop, they just don't see the difference.

could've just copied the template and linked it together (No backend). The client would've been easily fooled and boom 5K in the bank! Cha-Ching!

Should have just deployed shopify with a bit of customisation, easiest $5000 of your life

@jestdotty @devRancid they had some pretty specific requirements in terms of how they wanted to be built. Including a self hosting requirement.