Your Secret Guide to Ecommerce Website Pricing & Cost Factor

Once you decide to launch an ecommerce store, the first question that comes to your mind will be how much it would cost and not how to build it. 

The answer to this question is quite obvious because pricing depends on the needs of your online store. It depends on factors such as the size of the project, design, development method, integration, maintenance, the technology used and the customization level required for your store. So, the cost varies and you won’t have a clear pricing estimation until you finalize all your needs.  

There are two ways you can build your online store — ready ecommerce platform and custom ecommerce development. The ready ecommerce platform may not have the features you need, but it is a good option to launch your store quickly. On the other hand, the custom ecommerce development may cost higher, but it pays off you in all the ways if you choose the right things. Here are the major factors that help you determine your ecommerce website pricing. 

Top 10 Ecommerce Website Pricing Factors

Domain name and hosting 

The URL of your website or the domain name is as important as your brand name. The domain name has to be registered annually at any cost to continue in that domain name. Some factor to be considered while selecting the domain name: 

• Your ecommerce business type   

• The brand name of your business   

• Target country or region 

The cost of a simple domain name may vary from $8 to anywhere. Hosting makes your website accessible to people around the world. A poor hosting may result in longer loading time of your web page. 

It is proved that customers won’t wait in your ecommerce site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load the pages. 

Free hosting is also available for you but it lacks quality technical support, a frequent site crash, longer loading time. Hosting services will charge you depending upon the traffic of your website, features enabled and the range of hosting area. 

For instance, to have good services and support, it may cost around $250-$350 monthly. If you need high security, speed, and scalable environment it may cost up to $2,000 monthly. 

Design  

Design plays a crucial factor in deciding the overall cost. Your storefront provides the first impression of your website to visitors. So, it is important to have a great storefront and a highly responsive user interface. 

78% of ecommerce customers believe that the right storefront design can boost the conversion rate up to 17%. 

If you need a unique design for your online store, then it’s better to hire a professional team with a strong UI/UX expertise. Readymade themes help you save cost where you can quickly implement them on your website. Some of these themes are available as free while other paid themes may charge you around $300. 

Another way is the custom-made design. You can design any features you want, including custom layouts, animations and more. A custom layout design may approximately cost $10,000. It may vary depending on the specific requirements and complexity of the website. 

Functionality and Features 

An ecommerce website provides responsive and interactive functionalities for the customer to navigate easily. For providing responsive and highly accessible functionality, it amounts to a much higher cost.  

You may need customized search functionality due to the type of product you sell. You may also need an effective checkout with special benefits for clients. So, you need to check what plugins are available that suits your need. 

Integration  

By the end of 2019, nearly 2.1 billion consumers will use an eWallet to make a payment or transfer money. 

Integrating global payment gateways and shipping/tracking systems with the website is necessary for you to reach customers worldwide. There is also extensive testing of shopping carts, location-based technology and payment gateways that need to be done.  

It may take the additional cost to integrate it into ecommerce functionality. The major cost contributor depends on building individual product pages while ensuring that these perform seamlessly and display the correct information. 

Marketing and SEO  

Nearly 67,000 searches are performed on Google every second, and 39% of all global ecommerce traffic comes from searches made on Google. 

Ecommerce websites can promote their products in any of the digital channels and grow their business. Marketing includes both social media marketing and content marketing. It needs web content that may need pages and extract tools to personalize the data for your customers.  

Good content needs to contain keywords relevant to the business to attract more visitors when you seek inputs on how to build a website. SEO is an ongoing service, which includes content creation and optimization, keyword research, targeted reach and more. It can cost $200 to $1500 per month.  

Mobile Commerce Application 

Almost 40% of all ecommerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on the smartphones. 

A mobile application is an important factor to boost the revenue of your ecommerce store. A mobile app must support all the functions and features that are in the ecommerce site. The latest technology in developing the native-like mobile web app is PWA. It may be a little expensive development method, but it suits all types of mobile devices. 

Data import/ Database

When you want to optimize your ecommerce website, providing personalized product suggestions to your customers is important based on their past order or customer data. Therefore, the database must be capable of providing all the data needed to run your ecommerce store efficiently.

Most of the websites can’t handle data loading and they need a database management system that is integrated with your website. Hence database privacy and security are major concerns that need to be addressed, which result in a huge cost.

Maintenance

An ecommerce website handles heavy traffic. So, the website shouldn't face any downtime and must provide a better customer experience. 

According to Jeff Bezos “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that.” 

Ecommerce websites need to be maintained and updated continuously to perform efficiently. Maintenance services are offered either in annually or monthly and it's an essential component in deciding your ecommerce website pricing. Regular support and maintenance ensure that the software and hardware on the website are in place and results in higher visibility while delivering an amazing experience to your customers. 

Hiring a development team   

You can choose an experienced development team for developing your website, but it often costs much at the same time provides more value. Most of the developers are available on an hourly or monthly or long-term basis. Before hiring the ecommerce website developers, you need to make sure what type of services they provide and whether they can satisfy your requirements. 

Final pricing of your ecommerce website

The price of an ecommerce website varies depending on the features, additional services, specific requirements, and the hiring cost of developers who are working on it. In recent days, the cost of ecommerce website development is on the higher side, because of the need for uniqueness and customer engagement for a longer time. 

Also, new technologies are evolving continuously, which accounts for fluctuation in the ecommerce website pricing. So, it’s better to consider the ecommerce maintenance plan as part of the pricing factors.