What Is ECommerce?

E-commerce or electronic commerce is the strategy or technique of buying, selling, or trading products and services online. It is basically a brick-and-mortar shop available open for business on the Internet superhighway.

An e-commerce website allows any kind of business of any size a space over the internet to showcase and sell its products. On the other hand, for a buyer, it is a virtual shopping mall to purchase their desired product from hundreds of retailers from the comfort of their home.

As per recent statistics, global eCommerce will be worth roughly over $6.3 Trillion in 2023, and China is supposedly the largest contributor to that, followed by the United States of America.

If you’re considering building an eCommerce website, one of the most important things to keep in mind is the cost. Knowing how much an eCommerce website will cost you can help you plan your budget and ensure that you’re not overspending. Additionally, a well-optimized eCommerce website can help improve your online visibility, drive more traffic to your site, and ultimately boost your sales.

In this guide, we’ll break down the costs associated with building an eCommerce website, as well as provide tips on how to optimize your site for eCommerce SEO.

What Are The Various Types of ECommerce?

Although eCommerce, in general, is simply an online trade and transaction between a seller and buyer, the type of eCommerce website depends on the services provided on it. 

Let us understand six different types of e-commerce.

  • Business-to-Consumer (B2C): This model serves to sell the goods and services directly to its end users, i.e., “To the customers who are going to use the product.” E.g., Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart, etc. 
  • Business-to-Business (B2B): As the name implies, this method by any business to sell its goods or services to another business instead of an end user. A few examples of B2B websites are Amazon Business, Indiamart, etc
  • Business-to-Government (B2G): This business model involves selling products or services to governments or government agencies. A great example of this model is ammunition manufacturers selling their products, like guns and other weapons, to governments and militaries. 
  • Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C): These eCommerce websites are used by consumers to sell their products to other consumers. Websites like eBay, OLX, Craigslist, etc., are examples of this eCommerce model. 
  • Consumer-to-Business (C2B): A method involving an opportunity for a consumer to sell its product/service to businesses. A few examples of the C2B eCommerce model are Upwork, Shutterstock, Fiverr, etc., where you can upload your work or services in exchange for monetary payments. 
  • Consumer-to-Government (C2G): As the name suggests, consumers can pay and offer feedback to the governments and other administrations for services like electricity, water, insurance, taxes, etc. 

Although these are the different types of eCommerce websites, the essence of all of them is buying, selling, and trading products and services through online transactions. 

Elements Involved In The eCommerce Website Cost 

When building an e-commerce website, the cost of development may vary depending on several factors, like your business requirements, content management system, domain and hosting, SSL certificates, extensions, marketing efforts, etc.

An eCommerce website may go from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the kind of website you want. 

So let’s check out a few significant elements that control the cost of an eCommerce website.

  • Domain Name Pricing

The first thing you need for any website is a domain name. The costs depend on the name itself as well as your chosen extension, like .com, .org, .in, etc. 

Nowadays, the average cost of a domain name can be anywhere between $10 – $15 per year. Moreover, if you want a very specific one already owned by another party, then you’ll have to buy from them. That will be even more expensive, depending on the commission added by them. Check out the detailed guide on how to pick a domain name.

  • Website Hosting for E-commerce

After purchasing the domain name, you’ll have to select a hosting service for your website, which you can think of as renting a space on the internet to store all your data. Almost every website development platform includes hosting in its plans. But you can also buy it from other hosting service providers like Bluehost, Hostinger, and many more. 

However, you should be a little cautious while choosing the hosting provider as it impacts your website’s speed, performance, storage, security, and several other critical elements. Hosting provider charges usually vary depending on the type of plan:

  • Shared Hosting: $2.20 – $22.99 per month
  • VPS Hosting: $2 – $110 per month
  • Dedicated Hosting: $47 – $540 per month
  • Cloud Hosting: $4.50 – $240 per month
  • WordPress Hosting: $2.95 – $16.99 per month

Moreover, these hosting costs will also depend on the specific provider, and a few of the most popular ones are BlueHost, Ionos, A2 Hosting, Hostgator, GoDaddy, etc. 

  • SSL Certificate 

An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate provides a secure, encrypted connection between a website and the user’s browser. Google gives priority to websites with HTTPS requests, and even users tend to trust these websites more than those with HTTP. So a website with an SSL certificate will have an “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP,” with a little lock at the start of the address bar. 

  • Payment Processing Costs

When paying for a product, a consumer can choose between a variety of payment gateways. If they decide to pay online (through a credit card or another gateway like UPI or digital wallets), the merchant will have to pay a small percentage of the sale to that gateway. 

These payment processing costs may go anywhere from 1.5% – 3.5% on every transaction. 

  • CMS

CMS, or content management system, is a platform on which the website is developed. A few of the most popular eCommerce CMS platforms are WordPress (with WooCommerce), Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace. 

Now, WordPress (and WooCommerce) is inherently free of cost. But other eCommerce-centric CMSs come only with paid plans. The average cost of a CMS platform for an eCommerce website is between $2000 and $25000. 

  • Add-ons & Extensions

Add-ons and extensions help improve the design elements, features, and functionalities of a website. 

When it comes to WordPress, WooCommerce itself is a plugin to convert the website into an eCommerce store. WordPress has thousands of free themes and plugins, including WooCommerce. These plugins and themes can help you create and customize your eCommerce store comprehensively. 

If you want some customized features or functionality, you can even have eCommerce development companies develop customized themes and plugins just for your website. 

The extensions for eCommerce websites can be free or go from just a few dollars to hundreds of dollars, and the customized one may even cost thousands. 

  • Website Design & Development

If you’re looking to create a unique eCommerce website, you’ll need a custom design to stand out from the crowd. While platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce offer many design features and thousands of free themes, it may still be challenging to create your dream eCommerce storefront without experience.

That’s where a WooCommerce development company can help. You can hire WordPress developer who can work with you to create a fully customized eCommerce website that meets your business requirements. Hiring a developer with experience in eCommerce website development and WooCommerce can save you time and ensure professional results.

The cost of hiring a WordPress developer may vary depending on the scope of your project, its complexity, and the experience level of the developer. You can find developers available for hourly rates or on a project basis. Alternatively, you can create the website yourself, which may be cost-effective, but it can be challenging to achieve the desired results without experience

How Much Does it Cost to Have Someone Build an E-commerce Site?

When it comes to building any kind of website, after selecting a domain name, hosting service, SSL certificate, and CMS, you have three options to go about the development process. First, you may create the whole website yourself; with the CMSs, you don’t need any coding experience to create the website. But even so, without the design and development experience, you won’t know which extensions to integrate and how to go about the process. 

Then the second option is to hire an eCommerce development company and outsource the whole project to them. And last but not least, you can get in touch with a freelance web developer to handle the whole project or handle a particular part of it. 

  • eCommerce Development Company

Some website development companies may charge a fixed fee for building the whole site, and others have a variety of eCommerce hiring models, like:

  • Dedicated Team Model
  • Fixed Price Model
  • Hourly Price Model
  • On-site Team Model

You can choose a hiring model depending on your project requirements, and the cost may go from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

  • Freelance developer

The cost of hiring a freelance designer and developer depends on a variety of factors:

  • Size of the website
  • Features and functionalities required
  • Experience of the developer
  • Past projects
  • Skills and other credentials
  • Deadline

Like the development company, you can hire a freelancer either for the whole project or just a particular part of the process. 

If you hire an eCommerce development company or a freelancer, make sure you take a look at their reviews and ratings online to see what their past clients and customers have to say about their services. 

Conclusion

Whether you want a normal website or an eCommerce one, the cost of development will be predicated on a variety of factors, like CMS, domain name, host provider, SSL certificate, extensions and plugins, and so on. 

If, after choosing the domain name, host provider, and SSL certificate, you think of designing and developing the website yourself, the cost will be significantly less, just around a few hundred dollars for the different extensions for design and features. 

But if you decide to hire an eCommerce development company or freelance designer or developer, the cost of development will be much higher, in terms of a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

So if you want to create the best eCommerce website, make sure you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, hire a professional, as they’ll help you create a customized website to stand out amongst the crowd.