Businesses

How much does it cost to build an E-commerce Website?

A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding the Cost of Building an E-commerce Website

Building a website for your business is the boon that the Internet has made every business available to. Websites in now a day are as common as visiting cards used to be after the advent of print technology. Not only can they be useful for giving out information, but also can they be used for marketing your business in the market. An e-commerce website is a website that does buy and selling of goods or services on the Internet. The businesses might be a B2B i.e. Business to business or B2C i.e. business to the customer but the transactions of that business are done online through the Internet.

E-commerce Website Cost

There are sources available on the Internet that are free, which allows you to build a website for free. But building an e-commerce website, the following are the costs that you need to pay:

• Hosting costs
• Payment processing costs
• Design costs
• Add ons and extension costs

Let’s go through one by one each cost that is mentioned above to know what they mean and why do you require and how much do you require a minimum to spend for building your e-commerce website.

1. Hosting Costs:

An e-commerce website can either be self-hosted or it can be hosted on SaaS e-commerce platforms. If the website is self-hosted you don’t have to go through the limitations that you have to go through if the website is hosted on a SaaS e-commerce platform. While the hosting cost if the website is self-hosted varies from as low as $7.99 per month, $14.99 per month for getting the domain name and $69 for getting an SSL certificate.

Whereas if the website is hosted on the SaaS platform, the basic charges vary as per the SaaS platform that you choose from as low as $29 per month to as high as $79 per month.

2. Payment Processing costs:

There are payment processors available in the market that provides your website with a safe transaction processing option. The service charge of these payment processing service providers varies according to the number of transactions that are made on your website per month. They typically are calculated based on the price of goods/service that is bought from the website. 2.9 percent of the total is the current charge that is charged by payment processors and then $0.30 for one transaction.

3. Design cost:

The design of the website defines the ease of user interface with itself. The more user-friendly your website is, the more is the expectancy level of people to visit your website. The more is the expectancy level of people to visit your website, the more is the traffic driven on your website which in turn increases the probability to drive sales to your business. There are many templates available online, the standard templates are also available for free but buying a typical design can cost $30. As well as if you buy a customized solution that is applicable to your business particularly the cost can be about $1500 to $6000.

4. Add-ons and extension costs:

What is said about the design cost of a website applies to it’s add-ons and extensions also. Meaning, as design templates are available for free, so are the add-ons which are naturally required for an e-commerce website to grow. Whilst add-ons are generally available for free, there are some particular add ons which are available at a price that can cost up to $1000.

Having said that, building a website is now a task that almost does not require you to go anywhere. If you have a business, you can build your website yourself, sitting at your home and manage it from your own laptop.