We have been recently reviewing all of the options for developing an eCommerce store and ways that this can be achieved including the flexibility and the cost of ownership.
Recently Neto (an online managed eCommerce solution) changed it’s pricing from Australian dollars to US dollars overnight. Effectively this was a 30% price increase overnight and having gone down the managed solution path which includes Shopify and BigCommerce as a consumer you have no option but to pay for this increase.
With this in mind a basic online store on a managed platform with enough resources to enable the site to function will cost between $290 and $430 / month + the costs of setting the site up with a template, importing products, configuring shipping and payment gateways… and at no time do you own the software so should you wish to move to a new platform… the process needs to be started again. And yes if the price is raised again or the exchange rate differs dramatically… your stuck!
So let’s put a value to this, say $350 / month for 12 months – $4,200, plus a theme – approximately $120, plus customisation and configuration if you were to use a developer $500 – $1000 = $5,400 setup plus $4,200 each year and you don’t own anything!
What are the options?
For us it’s hard to go past WordPress and WooCommerce. The solution can be scaled now where the site load speed can be super fast and best of all it has so many plugins already developed and in development that the hosted platforms simply cannot keep up.
Recently we experimented with Magento 2.0 and it’s a beast to setup… product import with the slightest formatting issue and it cancels itself and the plugins and cost of implementation is 5-10 times that of WordPress.
In real costs, a starter WordPress / WooCommerce store can be setup very inexpensively but for a professional job budget for approximately $2,000… talk to your developer about monthly payment options to reduce the upfront costs and pay over 3-4 months… in most cases your developer will setup Google Search console and Analytics to start to get the site indexed in Google… and remember, setup a strong social media presence from the outset to drive traffic to the website.