It might be that you’re looking for the next big thing in the world of business. If you saw our previous post, you’ll no doubt be intrigued by the opportunities that e-commerce offers the entrepreneurial spirit.
Once you’ve had the rumblings of an idea of what to sell, then you’ll need to start to consider what the costs will be.
There are a number of options to choose from when you look at Platforms. We’ve covered the four main contenders in the previous post – these are WooCommerce, Squarespace, Magento and Shopify.
Onto the price.
What are the fixed costs?
WooCommerce Download for free
Free themes, premium themes from £$ 39 Extensions are free to $ 249 Squarespace SaaS – No download required Basic $ 30 or $ 26 if billed annually Advanced $ 80 a month or $ 70 if billed annually Magento Two versions Magento Community is free to download Magento Enterprise – $ 18000 a year Shopify Four plans available Lite starts at $ 9/month, Basic starts at $ 29/month, Pro starts at $ 79/month and Unlimited starts at $ 179 Transaction free of 2.9% plus 30c.
This is just a basic guide to the fixed costs involved. Obviously, it doesn’t take into account your development, design or other costs.
If you’re looking to build an e-commerce store, you’ll need to remember to include the budget for both initial start up costs and the cost of maintaining the store. Are you going to keep the store in house or outsource the website to a digital agency?
Other costs will include:
- Domain name
- Hosting
- SSL certificates
- Paypal fees etc.
- Design
- UX
- Development and documentation
- Testing
- Imagery
- Copywriting
Because of the complexity of building an online store, it is difficult to say how much it can cost to build.
Whatever option you choose, there’s one rule in business – you’ve got to spend money to make money. One thing that the experts agree on is that you will need to lay out some significant money to build an online store. While using WooCommerce and doing it yourself could cost as little as £1000 if you use a good host, get your SSL certificates and use a premium theme with the extensions you need, however this doesn’t account for your time and if you don’t know what you’re doing, this could be a lot of hours.
Maintenance costs for your store once it is build are expected to be approximately 3%-10% of any revenue that is generated. On average, it comes in at about 7%. If you generate £1million a year, you’re looking at spending a minimum of £30,000 to keep it ticking over nicely.
Scalable solutions like Magento mean that you can build a store that can address all your business needs. While they do require high levels of technical knowledge, it means that you can build your e-commerce store exactly the way you want it to deliver the best customer experience.
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