cost to build an ecommerce website Archives - Probytes Web Development Company

How much does it cost to create a shopping website? Determining the average cost of developing such websites is still not easy. It all depends on factors such as technology involved, business goals, time duration, number & type of products, website content, and several others.

While various ready-to-use platforms can enable a smooth development of an e-commerce website, these platforms cannot be entirely relied on. Some of the common factors that play a significant role in determining the cost of developing a shopping website are as mentioned below:

Is it a new/redesign/redevelopment website?
The number of pages to be developed?
The number of products to be listed?
The variety of products available like size and color?
Is the content ready for the products/website?
The product images/graphics to be used?
Is the domain registered?
What is the status of the server?
What are the modes of payment you plan to accept?
Would you like to have a blog installed on your website?
Do you want your website to be responsive?
Do you need any additional features like social media buttons or advanced SEO?

Major Factors That Impact Website’s Pricing

1. Platform

The hosting mainly impacts an e-commerce website. A website that is hosted on an external server like Shopify and Magento is outside of your reach. Though this offers you a ready-to-use website with features, like simplicity, zero codings, stability, and reliability; it does not allow you to customize it as per your requirements.

A self-hosted website is hosted on its server and gives its owner access to its code. This enables you to customize the website as per your requirements, have full control over its features, and access its code. However, it does not allow you to install new updates, lacks support, might lead to technical issues, and also involves a high setup cost. A basic variant of the ecommerce store can cost you about $3,000.

2. Hosting

It is essential to pre-decide the hosting you would use for your website. When making a choice, determine the prices of web hosting service providers, the storage limit, website traffic, products, and orders. Once these factors are identified, choose between a shared and dedicated server.

Shared hosting is the type of service in which a site shares a hosting space with multiple other sites. Although available at a lower cost, it comes with its own risk of slow transactions. On the other hand, dedicated hosting refers to the reserved hosting space for a particular website. Although it may cost you higher, it comes with advantages like better speed, own IP address, admin control, and zero risks from other websites.

Few of the common hosting spaces include DreamHost that starts at just $8.95 per month, WP Engine for $29 per month, and others. Commonly, the total cost of hosting ranges between $20-$60 for a small website with light traffic, $60-$150 for a mid-sized, and more than $150 for a large-sized e-commerce website.

3. CDN System

A CDN system is the one that helps collect user requests and enables a faster content delivery from a server that is closest to a particular user. One of the most recommended CDN systems is Cloudflare that is available at zero cost as well as acts as a firewall against attacks.

4. Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS is a platform that facilitates creating, editing, and publishing of content. If your e-commerce website requires a CMS, there are two options available. You can opt for either a CMS as a part of e-commerce platforms like Magento, OpenCart, and osCommerce or the one as a part of the functionality of the custom-built online store.

While a majority of CMS are available for free, integrating and custom developing an eCommerce CMS can typically range anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

5. Amount of Data

The amount of data that needs to be uploaded on an e-commerce website is of prime importance. This is because a website with limited data space might not allow you to upload all the product details and in fact, deteriorate the website’s performance. Therefore, you must always opt for a website with ample storage space, and that offers you a dozen of product variables like color, size, price, model, and others.

6. SEO

The website’s SEO also plays a crucial role in determining the price of its development. Since each website is made up of thousands of web pages that have different titles, descriptions, and image attributes, it is essential to understand the significance of SEO. A good SEO may help the website to rank higher on the search engine.

Know More : How To Create a Website?

The SEO for a small store may cost you up to $2,000 and for a large one, between $4,000-5,000. However, it is important to be careful about the fraudulent companies existing in the market as they are likely to fool the corporate by claiming considerable benefits in a shorter span.

Website Features That Impact Its Cost.

1. Customer Registration

Getting a customer registered on a website is not at all easy. Several factors such as whether the website has the products that customers are looking for; whether its design is user-friendly; and if there are any additional benefits one gets on registration play a significant role. Getting a customer registered on a website can, in turn, help in offering special discounts, track order information, exclusive offers, as well as access their purchase history.

2. Search/Navigation Bar

A search bar on a shopping website is very crucial. Helping improve the overall customer experience, the search bar also leads to a higher conversion rate and increased sales. You can improve this bar further by adding more criteria to the search results like price range, color, size, and product type.

3. Complex Pricing

If the products listed on the shopping website have a complex pricing structure and vary from merchant to merchant, then this is likely to impact the cost of developing an e-commerce website. The cost can also get impacted due to other pricing factors like special discounts and offers, SKU-based prices, exclusive deals on products, and various others.

4. Product Reviews

Allowing your customers to share their reviews about the products listed on the shopping website can hugely impact their overall experience. It is also one of the critical factors that can drive future sales of the product. Therefore, having this feature on your e-commerce website can affect its overall development cost.

5. Checkout

A shopping website can have several checkout options. It can be as simple as quick pay and order or as complex as adding items, confirming the items, choosing the payment option, making the payment, and then, placing the order. Depending on the type of checkout process, the cost of the website’s development may vary.

6. Payment Options

Making a higher number of payments options available for the customers can help improve their overall experience. Apart from cash on delivery (CoD), some third-party payment options like PayPal, Authorize, SecurePay, and Square can also be offered. Based on the number of payment options you would like to make available for your customers, the cost of setting up the shopping website would vary. Adding a payment gateway can be done for free or may cost you up to $79.

7. Mobile-friendly

Do you want your customers to access your e-commerce portal only through the web? Do you want your shopping site to be mobile-friendly? If the answer to the latter is yes, then be ready to spend a little extra on the website development. The easier you keep it for your users to visit the website, the higher your cost of developing it would go.

Know More : How Much Does it Cost to Build a Website like YouTube?

8. Other Features

Additional features such as view order status for the customers, product variations for the sellers, view shopping history for customers as well as sellers can also impact the website’s development cost.

Website Design Is A Key Factor

Be it any business, a website’s design is a critical factor in determining its success. Since customers like to shop from the websites with flashy designs and that look lively, it is essential to keep your shopping website’s design at par to their expectations. However, one must remember that an e-commerce website’s design should be highly functional and offer an immaculate experience to the customers.

If you are looking for a template that is easy to set up your basic shopping website, then it would cost you somewhere between $0 and $300. Making any further adjustments would lead to some additional cost. Hiring an agency would cost you somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. Therefore, we would recommend that you should not think about the dollars you would have to spend on building a website rather of the ROI you are likely to attain later.

Wrapping Up

To estimate the cost of developing a shopping website, it is essential to have a basic framework ready with you. Approaching a web developer or an external team without a layout for your website would not lead to any results.

It might instead lead to much confusion and make you anxious about the cost involved in developing the website. Therefore, it is recommended to always approach a web developer for website development with a proper layout so that you may get the work started in a single go.

With increasing horizons and expanding wings of the business community, more and more intellectual professionals are dreaming big for extending entrepreneurship and trying their luck, in this scenario of increasing demand in the industry especially in multi-million e-commerce marketplace small startups are also earning well.

In today business community not only niche brands but small smart ups are also turning out to be table turners, biggest online e-commerce websites like flipkart and alibaba have a total turnover of around 300 million U.S dollars today.

In India only e-commerce ecosystem has increased three-fold in the past two to three years, being started in 1997 the revenue in India alone is 39 billion in 2017 and expected to grow to 120 billion U.S dollar in 2020 which open up the multiple possibilities, growing with annual rate of 51 percent largest in the world sky is the limit.

The Estimated Cost to Build an E-commerce Website

The starting point of an e-commerce website requires efficient teamwork from developer end as well your end, for this first step is the exact understanding of concept and machinery that is behind such websites.

Domain Cost

This step is the first initiation if you want to start an online business, domain selection is must for it, you can easily register from any one of the available domain service providers like Google, go daddy or Bluehost, these domain registrars also offer DNS hosting which will cost you around INR 900 TO 1200/ year roughly 50 dollar.

Remember that a domain name come with a fixed space that the provider allots you, ftp access etc, most important is the loading speed of that domain. With the competitive availability of multiple services hosting, today the choice is more easy and broader.

Server

Next stop for creating the website or a web application is the host server. Server space allotted according to the annual hosting packages, these services might cost you anywhere from INR 5000 to 10,000 INR, that is 100 to 150 U.S dollar, a professional one in turn can goes up to 40,000 INR(400 to 500 U.S dollar).

Designing

Cost of designing a website varies from design to design that you choose. For just trying the working of this server you can go with a free design that is available online but they also have numerous drawbacks.

For exclusive professional design customized according to your need, the cost may range from 10,000 to 3,00,000 (4000- 5000 U.S dollar).

Another option is to hire an exclusive web designer that will do required extensive research and uses own experience and knowledge to design a high-performance custom tailored website for you.

Launching

The fundamental aim of any website growth is to outreach every single target audience, either offline or online branding your very own website is crucial.

Especial marketing strategies should be kept in mind with time to time steady implementation to increase the inflow influx of clients through television ads, Social media and telemarketing.

Content Copyright

Any content available on the website is the prime soul or attraction to the consumer who becomes an influence to buy the product through the given content; this might attract legal aspect also.

This can be conveyed with the help of web portal representations, and web content including article and blogs costing almost approx INR 3000(U.S dollar 150 – 200).

Content Management

As we know that for business expansion presence of quality content management is crucial. These can be managed through content management system; in market various CMS available like Joomla, WordPress, magneto and Drupal.

With an internal team of developers or outsourcing from outside cost may go to 1,00,000 INR to 5,00,000 INR (5000 – 7,000 U.S dollar).

Increase the Marketing Inputs

After the finished product goes live on the floor strategies to make it constantly popular should be made. These may include social media set up like Twitter and Facebook or having an email newsletter set up. The cost will come around 5000 INR to 50,000 INR (150 to 5000 U.S dollars) on a total.

In the end, the average cost may end up anywhere from 5ooo US dollars to 50,000 U.S dollars, can score high if different tools are added, depending upon the customization thoughts, tools and demands you have in your mind from your business and the website.

Going deep into the technical aspect and choice of platform can jump off the costing to three hundred U.S dollars.

In the conclusion, it can be said that on actual working grounds it is very difficult to comment exact effective costing, and sometimes become very difficult based on many factors like the design, hosting, and platform which are the deciding factors. Also, these expenses keep on fluctuating.

Read also : How To Make an App like Flipkart

One of the fastest growing industries, at least for coming years, even though they are on a virtual platform and seems easy going but lot goes behind the curtains to prepare the finished website which includes sheer hard work and brilliance of a developer.

Tag: cost to build an ecommerce website

How Much Does it Cost to Create a Shopping Website?

How Much Does it Cost to Build an Ecommerce Website?