If you are reading this article, you may be considering starting your own eCommerce business and looking for ways to manage your expenses.
When you plan your procurement strategy, advertising campaign, and supply chain modules, it is important to carefully consider your initial capital expenditure.
This will help you determine whether investing in a new venture is feasible, whether you should invest your capital, or whether you need to cut costs.
So, how much does it cost to build an eCommerce website?
As eCommerce experts, we get this question from many people. But there is no single answer to this question. Calculating the exact cost of setting up an eCommerce website is not straightforward. The overall cost depends on many different factors. But surely we can tell you the estimated cost.
Creating an eCommerce website can range from $1,000 to $10,000. However, developing a website that can meet the demands of an enterprise-level business will require significant investment, ranging from $9,000 to $35,000.
Such a website will offer customized themes and plugins optimized for the business’s needs, ensuring optimal performance and functionality.
Let’s dive in to understand what factors you should consider before creating an eCommerce website and the different costs included in building an online store.
So, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
If you’re considering building an eCommerce website, it’s essential to think carefully about a few key factors that can impact its success. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at five crucial factors you should consider before starting to build your eCommerce website.
When considering building an eCommerce website, defining the type of eCommerce business you want to build is crucial. Identifying your target audience and understanding their needs and preferences is essential to create a successful eCommerce business.
There are several types of eCommerce business models, including B2B, B2C, C2C, and C2B. Each type has unique characteristics and requires different strategies and tools to succeed. Understanding the type of eCommerce business you want to build will help you make informed decisions about website design, marketing, and product selection.
It’s important to know that the cost of making an eCommerce site can vary greatly depending on how complicated the project is, what platform is used, and how much customization is needed.
When planning your eCommerce development budget, you must consider costs like website hosting, website design and development, payment gateway integration, and ongoing maintenance and updates. It is also important to consider the ROI and make a budget that fits your business’s goals and aims.
If you already have an offline store or are starting a new online store, you must consider several factors before building an eCommerce website. Determine the target audience and the products or services offered. This will help create a user-friendly interface and optimize the website for search engines.
Ensure that the website is integrated with the existing inventory management system to ensure efficient order processing and fulfillment. Finally, ensuring the website is secure and meets all regulatory requirements to protect customer data and prevent fraud is crucial.
You need to think carefully about the features and functions you want your online store to have. These should be based on your business needs and goals. Some crucial features include an easy-to-use interface, responsive design, and a secure payment gateway.
You should also consider features that enhance the customer experience, such as personalized recommendations, customer reviews, and a user-friendly search function. Furthermore, you may want to include social media integration, inventory management tools, and multilingual support.
It is important to consider the shipping and logistics options to ensure customers are happy and orders are delivered on time. With options like standard and express shipping, you can reach a wider range of customers with different needs.
Also, putting in place a tracking system can give you and your customers peace of mind. You might want to connect your website to shipping platforms like USPS, FedEx, or UPS to make shipping easier and less likely to go wrong.
An eCommerce store looks aesthetically neat and functionally sound, but for it to work the way it does, diverse elements come together and operate in tandem with each other. Every element involved comes with a price tag (for development), which are the fundamental factors that influence your website cost.
To give you an idea, here are some of the expenses you would incur initially:
I’ll go ahead and do you a favor of elaborating each of the factors for better understanding.
On the world wide web, your eCommerce website needs a place it can call home. It’s where it resides and where all the required files and elements are stored for retrieval, processing and display.
And when it has a place to stay, it also needs an address. As far as the internet protocols and jargon are concerned, it’s called the domain name. Having a good domain name helps you reach the exact audience groups you want seamlessly.
However, there’s a catch. Most of the ideal domain names are already taken. So, if you’re willing to pay for the premium domain name, you could go ahead and purchase it, which will again influence your eCommerce website cost. Or, if you want to keep your expenses low, you could brainstorm on more creative names that people would have hardly thought of and then buy the domain name at regular pricing.
Let’s discuss hosting now.
There are two types of hosting options available to you –
These are the platforms or software applications that you can download from service providers’ websites, and install and set up your eCommerce website. Before you host your website on these servers, you need to have your domain name and an SSL certificate for your domain ready.
An SSL certificate is nothing but an encryption layer you add to your website to prevent 3rd party elements on the internet from accessing your website’s details. By default, details such as the domain name, the owner, and their residential and official addresses are visible to anyone, and an SSL certificate prevents these pieces of information from showing up online. This costs you as well.
Once you have these ready, you could choose a platform like Magento or WooCommerce as your hosting service provider. Each has its own set of pricing, features and pros and cons. For instance, the pricing of WooCommerce starts at around $8 per month. When you pay for a year, there is a significant reduction in the price you will eventually pay.
That’s great you might think. Wait.
The basic plans are designed to handle only a specific amount of traffic. These are beginner plans that are ideal when you just start up. As your business grows and becomes more visible to potential customers, more people will want to visit your eCommerce store and purchase products from your brand.
At that time, when more people access your website at the same time, it would definitely go down or malfunction. That’s when you would be pushed to upgrade your plans to increase traffic, file storage and other functionalities.
For the uninitiated, SaaS refers to Software as a Service. These are completely contrary to self-hosted websites and differently influence your cost to build an eCommerce website. You don’t have to install any software or have a resource take care of its maintenance and management.
These are platforms you could use by simply logging in. Platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce are SaaS-based hosting platforms that instantly let you create eCommerce websites. If you want more customization, you can go with BigCommerce. Otherwise, Shopify can be your perfect choice as it has many benefits.
They offer tremendous templates, royalty-free images and other functionalities to help you set up your eCommerce platform from scratch, even without technical knowledge or skills. You could choose your plan depending on your requirements and even scale up or down based on your business and turnover. To start with SaaS-based hosting, you only need $30 per month.
Website design. Big deal, right?
How much will it cost to hire a couple of freelancers and get logos and wireframes out?
Well, if you have this mindset, you’re doing it wrong because close to 75% of the internet population believes a website’s design is directly linked to its credibility.
Also, close to 38% of your visitors will abandon your website and never come back if they find your website’s design redundant or unattractive.
These aren’t my opinions but stats.
So, to make your eCommerce website stand out from the clutter (or crowd), you need to invest significantly in its design and aesthetics. Your website design plays an important role in enhancing your eCommerce website user experience.
Now, SaaS platforms offer hundreds of themes and templates you can instantly check out and deploy for your eCommerce store. Most of them come for free or are priced very less. However, you need to realize that when something’s free or priced less, a major chunk of the population will head towards it.
This would make a lot of eCommerce businesses – regardless of whether it’s in your niche or a different one – feature the same, templated color schemes and aesthetics.
Custom designs, on the other hand, come with their own development expenses. Here, everything (logos, designs, website layout, responsiveness and more) is created from scratch, and the process is very meticulous and customized. A number of factors like your target audience personas, their preferences, competition, demographics, technical learning curve and more are considered to ensure layouts, CTAs, images, text, and typography are all in line with the preferences and inclinations of your end users.
Comparing the eCommerce website design cost involved in the two, you would end up spending anywhere from $1500 to $2000 for templates offered by SaaS platforms and even more for a custom-designed website.
Now that we’ve understood the importance of design in eCommerce website development and the relative expenses associated with it, let’s move on to understand that design is not everything for a website. In fact, eCommerce design carries just 50% of the weightage in the entire spectrum. It’s a medium to captivate audiences into using your online store.
Your visitors will sustain and explore your products and services only if it is technically sound, functionally seamless and secured. This is another factor in eCommerce website cost. To throw in some more numbers, understand that poor website design and functionality have cost eCommerce companies close to $2.6bn.
So, apart from how your website looks, how it functions is another major factor you need to consider. The functionality of an eCommerce website can be broken down into two categories –
These are the essential eCommerce features required to make your website operational. It does what you intended to and nothing more or less. Some of the basic features include
Advanced features are modules that go beyond executing basic tasks and processes. These are your USPs or standout features that help attract more users and eventually turn them into customers. While a majority of the brands in your circle would stop with basic features, you could go a step ahead and implement some advanced modules that will help grow your business.
To give you an idea, here are some advanced features you could consider:
As far as the cost is concerned, self-hosted and SaaS-based platforms involve similar expenses, where you would incur anywhere from $5000 to $15000. If you intend to go for a complete customized development process, your budget could go over $20000 for advanced development.
Extensions are services that are available for utilization when necessary. There are a lot of extensions and 3rd party plugins available for eCommerce websites that can be easily incorporated or integrated into your source code or SaaS platform. These influence your eCommerce website cost by helping you reduce development expenses you would otherwise incur when custom-developing these modules from scratch.
Modules like analytics, heat maps, lead generation forms, newsletter or discount coupon sign-ups, free shipping and more can be availed as extensions from platforms easily. However, when selecting a plugin or a 3rd party element, always ensure it’s from a trusted source or a developer by reading reviews. You never know what’s happening under the hood and it’s ideal to stay away from consequences by utilizing plugins from authentic developers and communities.
You can also read:
In addition to the upfront costs associated with building an eCommerce website, there are ongoing expenses to consider as well. Let’s look at some ongoing costs of an eCommerce website.
You’re not simply going to launch your eCommerce website and sit and wait for traffic to magically show up, are you? You’ll have to make efforts to bring traffic to your store by promoting it online across diverse channels and mediums.
Digital marketing is key in standing out today. With plenty of platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more available to reach out to your customers, you will have to consider expenses you will incur in generating leads and building brand visibility as well.
Apart from social media platforms, there are also avenues like search engines that are proving to be extremely successful and profitable for eCommerce website owners. Statistics also reveal that RoI from Google Ads is close to 200% and that around 63% of the users are more likely to click on a search engine like that of Google.
This means your eCommerce website development cost should include marketing expenses as well.
An eCommerce store (or any website) isn’t complete as soon as it is launched. In fact, the real challenge starts from after it is launched. The website has to be maintained for as long as you’re in the business of eCommerce.
From handling heavy traffic during seasonal sales and deals to ensuring your website is devoid of DDoS attacks and other potential threats, there are tons of expenses associated with maintaining your eCommerce website.
When your online store is in the development stage, it suffers from tunnel vision, where your development teams are all looking at its functionalities from one perspective. Only when it is taken live and exposed to real people and real-world environments that its flaws actually start coming out.
From bugs to lethal operational concerns, there could be diverse concerns associated with your eCommerce store and fixing each post launch will involve expenses. These are recurring expenses that you need to channelize every month or annually.
For small and medium sized businesses, the expenses could be around $1500 per annum and for large businesses with heavy website traffic, this could be per month.
When it comes to building an eCommerce platform, the cost of hiring a website developer can vary greatly depending on the level of sophistication you want to achieve. While there are many DIY options available, engaging the services of a professional eCommerce website development agency may be necessary if you wish to integrate complex features into your online store.
The cost of hiring a website developer can vary based on several factors, including the development timeline, the project’s complexity, and the developer’s expertise and experience.
A basic eCommerce website with simple features can cost around $5000 to $10,000. It might cost approximately $10,000 to $30,000 if you want a complicated platform with bespoke product pages, inventory management, and connected payment gateways.
An eCommerce development company may assist you by performing the following:
An eCommerce development service may demand a hefty fee to design your eCommerce website, but the cost is far less than that of an in-house developer with superior results.
This is where it gets really confusing. Considering all the factors we’ve discussed so far, let’s quickly look at a table to understand it and differentiate pricing involved with two distinct approaches.
Pricing involved with two distinct approaches
| Industry Size | eCommerce Development Approach | |
|---|---|---|
| Conventional eCommerce | SaaS Platforms | |
| Small Scale | Less than $10,000 | Less than $1,000 |
| Medium Scale | $15,000 to $30,000 | Less than $2,000 |
| Large Scale | Over $30,000 | Over $2,000 |
Despite so many factors involved, not everything could be applicable to you and your business needs. At WebDesk, we believe every business is unique and what works for one need not necessarily work for another even if it is in the same operational space.
However, this clarity comes to you only when you talk to experts and veterans who have been in the industry for decades. That’s exactly where we come in. Our expertise as an eCommerce development company lies in understanding your business vision, goals and requirements precisely to suggest you services, modules and functionalities required for your eCommerce business.
So, when you approach us, an eCommerce website is tailored according to your preferences. Regardless of your budget, you could prefer our eCommerce consulting services, custom eCommerce development services, 3rd party integration services and more.
All you need to do is have a clear idea of your business vision and get in touch with us for a detailed consultation. When we are on the same page, we will collaborate to work on turning your million-dollar idea into a profit generating business.
The cost of a dynamic eCommerce website can vary significantly based on factors such as the size and complexity of the website, the features and functionalities required, the platform and technology used, and the expertise and experience of the development team. The average cost of an eCommerce website starts at $20,000 for small businesses and can rise to $250,000 or more for large enterprises.
The cost of installing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for an eCommerce website can vary depending on the provider and the type of SSL certificate needed. Depending on your site’s security needs, it can cost anywhere from $5 to $1,000 per year.
The main cost factors in maintaining an eCommerce store include website hosting and maintenance, security updates, plugin or extension updates, website backups, and technical support. It can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 a year to maintain an eCommerce website with 100 to 1000 products.
Some of the main cost factors related to an ecommerce site include website design and development, website hosting and maintenance, payment gateway fees, and marketing and advertising. But website design and development can be the most expensive part, especially for custom eCommerce websites with advanced features and functionalities.
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