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When building an online business or starting any other investment, it is very important to know every possible expense. So, knowing how much your eCommerce website is going to cost is of great value. Making an E-commerce website depends on many conditions and variables which greatly affects the final cost.

So, having solid info on potential costs could save you and your team a lot of potential headaches, and avoid potential overspending.

Ecommerce Website Design

Due to our experience in the field of website design, we can offer very good solutions even with a tight budget, if the client knows his priorities and could communicate it with the rest of the team. We can help with presenting different e-commerce platforms, and additional services and tools needed for a successful business project. And we consider this to be right way to calculate all hidden cost of building an e-comm website.

So, what are the most important expenses?

• Hosting and domain
• Payment processing costs
• Website Design fees
• Plugins and features prices
• Basic SEO and marketing cost

If you are interested in designing an e-commerce website, there are many platforms that you can use, from WooCommerce to Shopify. Some of them are free - using open source, and some of them are paid services.

So, how can you make a smart choice and choose a solution that will even save you money? Let’s see, cost by cost.

The platform of your choice

Web hosting and domain costs are the first things you’ll pay for when starting an ecommerce website. This means you are paying for a place where all your website files will be stored. Also your domain name is additional cost you have to pay for in order to use www.yourwebsite.com.

In e-commerce, there are a few differences caused by different tech requirements. First, you can use Wordpress along with WooCommerce for online store. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that is free but comes with some other additional cost like theme cost or the cost of some other plugins.

Yet it looks encouraging that it doesn't need any licenses, and no one is asking for money at any point. This is by far the best and the most popular WordPress plugin so far. It has many useful features, works with any WordPress theme and the setup is pretty fast.

Even if this is, as we said before, free software, you need a WooCommerce web hosting account to install it. And because of the recent development with major search engines, you’ll need an SSL certificate.

Website hosting account could cost up to 10 € a month, and along with a domain name it could cost you 80-90€ annually for a domain and an SSL certificate. As your business grows, you’ll have to upgrade your hosting plan to handle more traffic. So, hosting costs increases with more customers.

And with other platforms, if you choose something from the SaaS area, you will have monthly costs from 30€ to 300€ on the platform like Shopify. This means your hosting costs will start increasing as more customers visit your website. The hosting is included along with SSL, but you’ll need to pay for the domain.

Payment Processing Costs

The payment processing costs are very important for an e-commerce platform. This means handling all payments, and how much it will cost you to accept payments from your customers.

WooCommerce is open-source software, and it supports almost all payment platform integrations, including Stripe and PayPal. You will pay the processing fees to the payment gateway service you choose. Additionally, it may help you choose between different rates.

Using WooCommerce, you can compare the rates for different payment services and don´t worry about how many sales you have on your website – it is unlimited.

Shopify has its own payment solution called Shopify Payments. It accepts credit card payments on your website, but also offers many third-party payment gateways. Shopify Payments is available only in 13 countries so far, and you’ll need to read payments terms for your country very carefully.

Then, using a third-party payment service will cost you plus 2.0% additional fee. Plus, if you are not in those 13 select countries, then you will pay 2% additional charges for each transaction.

Website Design Fees

Now we’re at the real start, and that’s when the design kicks in. Many predefined solutions mean a lot of same or similar design floating around cyberspace. A fresh and custom made design could help you get ahead of competition.

First, you must choose a theme - fortunately, WooCommerce offers thousands of themes completely free of charge or for a small fee, starting from 25€. And if you want to be completely original, hiring a designer for a custom website is a must.

That means that the designer will create a unique and customized website, especially for your business. All the features and ideas – if possible, could become a reality and hopefully bring you a ton of money.

But it may be a sort of an expensive sport, because depending on your requirements and the developer's fee, it could start from €1.000 and lead to even €10.000 total website cost. For an enterprise-level, prices could go up to 10x more.

Plugins

An Ecommerce platform is simply too big and demanding software, so it had to be built as core software that could be extended using different plugins. These plugins provide new functionalities and make your website a powerful selling machine.

And - we have a winner, as you probably know. WooCommerce has thousands of available plugins, both free and paid. Paid plugins are going from 20€ to more than 200€, depending on the required functionality.

Basic SEO and Marketing

This is only an addition (almost necessary) when it comes to website design. Custom or enterprise-level design brings a bit of a basic (on-page) SEO, just for the sake of it, but if you are planning to be “in the game” for some time, you must invest in both SEO and Marketing. But it is easier when you know exactly how much you have to spend building your own e-commerce website, isn’t it?