With expeditiously growing interests of people looking to develop an on-demand e-commerce website, our clients have often complained about various web developers quoting them haywire figures when it comes to the commercials for developing and maintaining such websites. The commercials certainly differ depending on your needs. Moreover, it depends on whether you’re choosing a freelance web developer or professional tech-savvy company.

Once you understand and have your requirements, type of platforms, and the source doing this job in place, here’s an in-depth breakdown of the costs of development and maintenance of your e-commerce website:

1. eCommerce Platforms

Depending upon how simple or complex the eCommerce platform is and what the licensing costs might be, the costs may vary quite dramatically for similar functionality. There are industry-specific solutions, integrated solutions based on ERP systems, and software as a service (SaaS) offerings designed to be comfortable for business owners to set up and configure themselves.

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 A business owner can not (without expertise) set up an eCommerce website designed with more configurable and customizable offerings like Magento and Magento Enterprise. So at a minimum, you are likely to spend $5,000.00 with a good domestic vendor just to set up your store and do basic configuration and training.

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2. eCommerce Web Design

Many platforms, and especially SaaS offerings, have design galleries, themes, or templates you can apply to your site yourself. While these may not be a perfect fit for your business or dramatically set you apart from other businesses who may use the same designs. These templates are a quick and cheap option.

Expect to spend from $0 to $250 to purchase a theme and another $1,000 to $2,000 making minor changes and customizations. This is more than just a logo change, but not a custom design either. When you get into a custom design, the sky’s the limit on possible expenses. Similarly, a custom theme may cost $10,00 to $100,00 depending on the specifics, requirements, and depth of the process.

3. Custom eCommerce Programming and Functionality

Many platforms (especially the good ones) provide for module or extension support where someone else developed the functionality. And you can add to it your site (for a much lower cost than you could develop it yourself). Check first to see what extensions are available before writing custom code. Be prepared, however, for some of the extensions to be poorly written or implemented. Our firm always audits/evaluates extensions for quality, security, features, and support before recommending them to clients.

Outside of known extensions, custom development can get expensive quickly. A good team/firm will develop a secure, and reliable code thoroughly tested. While this is more expensive than just tossing it together as quickly as possible, your custom code will hold up better over the long term. Extensions can break when you upgrade the core system. Hence, the poor code can cost you more money even if it works at first.

4. eCommerce Web Hosting

Hosting is more predictable than other variables. SaaS offerings will typically include some level of hosting in their packages. You will want to check the included limits for things such as storage, traffic, products, customers, and orders. These solutions start out cheap and grow in cost as your sales and needs grow. You can plan on at least $20 – $250 in hosting costs before growing out of a typical SaaS solution.

Hosting for a custom eCommerce system will probably start around $300 a month for decent service and support. However, this probably won’t provide true PCI (credit card security) compliance. For a successful and busy site (with average requirements for redundancy, speed, scale, and security) hosted in a cloud or grid environment, hosting could cost upwards of $1,000 – $2,000 a month.

To sum it up, if you have a budget of $100,000, for both developing and maintaining the website, you are good to go. This cost is of course excluding the marketing of your e-commerce company.

Looking for a company who can do all these shenanigans for you while you focus on strategizing and developing your business? Here we are! Get in touch with us and we will discuss in detail and develop your e-commerce website.