How Much Does an eCommerce Website Cost?

Considering that eCommerce sales worldwide in 2018 is expected to cross 2.77 billion USD, everyone is either running an eCommerce website or busy setting up one

Before we even begin to answer the question how much does an eCommerce website cost, let’s understand that eCommerce is a channel of doing business, and in many ways, it is no different from any other modes of doing business.

The same rules of business apply: research demand-supply gaps, invest in people and processes, promote your offerings, build systems to serve better, keep learning and stay agile.

With that context, it’ll be fair to say you cannot expect to invest $10 in an ‘eCommerce website’ and look forward to making a couple of million dollars a few months later.

We’ll try and not dissuade you away from setting up an eCommerce website, but the total figure of eCommerce website cost will be significantly higher than a couple of Café Mochas at Starbucks.

As all eCommerce sites are not the same,the average cost of an eCommerce website depends of various factors like platform, requirements and customizations, as every eCommerce startup has different needs.

4 Most important factors in budgeting for an ecommerce website

When you ask the question ‘How much does it cost to build eCommerce website?’, There are numerous factors you’ll need to consider.

However, not all of them are of equal simportance. Hence, before we proceed to list out all the factors that go into the total costing, we’ll take up the four most important factors that will most influence your budget in both financial as well as strategic sense.

Let’s take up each of these four factors briefly.

1. The traffic, conversion and sales goals you expect to achieve

   Your systems should be designed to handle the load you desire to have. Design parameters will be drastically different for sites targeting 500 visitors a month and sites targeting 250,000 visitors a month. Naturally, your budget changes too.

2. The number of products you plan to offer for sale over time

   If you are selling only two products, say, half-pound pack and one-pound packs of Italian roast espresso coffee beans, your database doesn’t have too many variables to deal with.
   
   Compare it with an online store selling 250 different types of tees in 3 sizes (S, M, L), the product pages and the database requirements grow huge.

3. Ongoing marketing activities: in-house vs outsourced

   No matter what an ‘expert’ tells you: online marketing and SEO is never a one-time thing. You need to do it on a regular basis, or else you will quickly fall off the search engine results.
   
   Whether you have an in-house team to carry out the promotional activities or whether you’ll be taking help from an agency that’s expert in online marketing will become decisive in the long run.

4. Available technical resources for future maintenance

   Just because a site is up and running right now, there is no guarantee it will run smoothly forever. A large number of issues, both minor as well as severe, can result from regular events like upgrades in 3rd party software to attacks with malicious intentions. Do you have a team to handle that? Or would you instead outsource to website development agency to do it? Read More...How Much Does an eCommerce Website Cost?