eCommerce is an industry that is packed with high growth potential for its participants if they can get through the competition. With a market share that is expected to touch US $8.1 Trillion in 2026, you, as an entrepreneur, must do all you can to grab a significant chunk of that. One of your most important assets in this endeavor will be your website. An eCommerce website is both the face of your business and how the business occurs. Thus, its development should be a low-cost, high-return process, something eCommerce website developers can make possible.
To be able to pay the right amount for eCommerce web development, you should know the status of your company’s finances. It requires a thorough budgeting process, with a good idea of your estimated future cash flows. It lets you know the total cost of ownership of your website in the long term, and what amount you can spend towards its development to get a valuable product.
There are many factors that you should consider for the development process like the technology used for it, maintenance costs, changing market dynamics, etc. Each of these affects how much you have to spend on the website. Read on to learn more about them and how outsourcing the process helps you get the best deal.
Ways To Set The Right Budget For Your eCommerce Website Development
1. Choosing The Optimal Platform
Technology has made it easier than ever to create a website, with plenty of eCommerce-specific web development frameworks available. They each come with their strengths and weaknesses, as well as development costs. Your choice of development platform will affect your overall budget due to the features offered and the time taken to complete your project.
Bigcommerce leads this space with its easy-to-use, feature-laden platform that helps developers set things up quickly. Its commonplace presence means that it is also likely that your eCommerce web development company will be using it. Magento is the next big one on the list. It is not as easy to use, requiring skilled developers to take a lot of control over the project. But its open-source nature makes it a big draw among its users and keeps the development costs low.
Shopify fits in next, with a ubiquitous presence and abundant features. It is not an open-source platform though, meaning there’s even a paywall for accessing its basic features. Each of these platforms comes with premium tier packages that add more features at higher costs. Thus, your budget should consider the cost of these platforms and the choice of feature packages, depending on how you want your website to look and function.
2. Adding Physical Stores To The Mix
Online selling can be difficult on your business’s resources, but the presence of physical stores takes it up several notches. So, when you outsource your project to an eCommerce web development company, you should factor in the cost of running your physical stores too.
The presence of physical storefronts can be an advantage in many ways. For example, a customer
can order something online and then pick it up at your physical store at a convenient time. However, it also comes with many disadvantages, like paying for rent/lease, store management personnel, safety, security, etc. With the shopping trend shifting towards online purchasing, your online sales will likely need to cover the drop in sales at your physical stores.
Therefore, you should add its costs to your overall web development expenses. You can then calculate how much you can spend on your project without affecting your corpus negatively.
3. Integrating Third-Party Applications
Running an eCommerce business is multifaceted, requiring various technological tools to make it seamless. Web development platforms alone won’t always cut it, which is why you should add other third-party applications to your website. Which type and how many of them you add to your business depends on the scale of your business, its niche, and other such factors.
They, in turn, determine the eCommerce web designing company you will be choosing as not every design company covers every type of app. You should choose an agency that can handle all of the third-party applications you need. That choice of third-party applications, including the number you use, will factor into your budgeting. They each come with fees similar to development platforms and your cost increases as you go with more features.
Payment processor PayPal, for instance, charges a flat rate of 0.30 USD for every merchant transaction, plus 2.9% of the total transaction amount when over %10.
4. Including The Marketing Costs
Your eCommerce website is worthless if people can’t find it online or have no idea about your brand. You can avoid these problems by having the right marketing strategy for your business. It should include both organic marketing and paid, with elements of traditional marketing alongside digital for expanded visibility. You should enquire about the additional marketing services your web development company offers alongside the outsourced web development project.
By opting for both, you can cut down on the overall costs of your project. Organic marketing in the form of SEO is necessary to get ranked high on search result pages. It’s not just your home page that requires optimization but all of your product descriptions. This ensures that you have the best chance at visibility for every kind of search query related to the products you sell.
Paid marketing in the form of Pay-per-Click and traditional marketing techniques like leaflets and TV ads are also vital for the quick dissemination of a brand name. They also help inform potential customers about special events like sales quickly. Every one of these ads adds to your overall costs, so they should be considered for the cost-benefit analysis of your website development.
5. Considering Domain Name and Hosting Costs
Your domain name will be your website’s identity, so you should make it as unique as possible. And with uniqueness comes costs. Typically, these costs get averaged out over the years due to many domain names being available as subscription packages. However, you may need to pay a large sum upfront if you want permanent ownership of your domain name.
Your eCommerce website designing company can help you in this regard. They will have the experience of selecting the best domain name for projects like yours at a suitable price. You can enquire with them about the costs and how they intend to add that to your overall development costs. Besides the domain name, you should also consider the right hosting platform for your site. It should be able to handle the traffic of your site along with added features regardless of scale.
Some web development platforms offer their hosting service while others let you integrate them. Again, contact your development agency about the right one for your needs and the associated costs as they vary depending on the hosting platform and features opted for.
6. Including Security Software Expenses
Security is paramount in this day and age of cyberattacks. An eCommerce site is particularly vulnerable since it contains valuable customer information like credit card numbers. Therefore, you should select the best security software available to prevent your site from falling prey to attacks.
They can be had as third-party integrations or standalone applications. The cloud service provider you’re using will also have a suite of security measures that comes with their service package. One of the most important ones you can have is the SSL certificate, which encrypts your website during data transmission over the internet.
An SSL certificate costs between US$ 20-70 a year. Your eCommerce web design company can add it to your site by integrating its cost into the service price. Antimalware and other similar security software costs vary with the level of security you’ve opted for and the provider.
Conclusion
An eCommerce website is not just a gateway for customers to buy their desired products; it also represents the brand and its purpose. Thus, it’s crucial that you hire eCommerce developers for its development to make budgeting easy. You will get the advantages of currency exchange values and economies of scale. Where you would be paying a minimum of US$ 50 for development in North America, you’d instead pay only about US$ 20 for the same service if you outsource to India. It saves
a lot of money in the long run and helps keep your ROI high.
