How much does it cost to build an ecommerce website these days?
In this post, we take a look at key components of ecommerce websites and how much they cost.
The cost of an ecommerce website: an overview
Here’s a breakdown of each ecommerce website cost:
Domain
- Free or $0.99 for your first year
- 10-$20/year from a .com domain
Branding
- Free if you create a logo yourself
- $20-$1,000 for a freelance graphic designer
- Thousands for a design agency
Hosting
- $5-$299/month for small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses
SSL Certificate
- Free from Let’s Encrypt
Website Design
- Free to $500 for a predesigned theme or template for an ecommerce platform
- $500 to $10,000 for a custom design and/or functionality
Third-Party Plugins and Extensions
- Free to $199 per extension
There are also a plethora of business expenses that are hard to predict. One of the more steady expenses is payment processing, which typically costs 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
There are also warehouse expenses, expenses related to order fulfillment, and marketing expenses.
While the latter expenses are not required to build an ecommerce website, they’re essential for its operation.
How much does an ecommerce site cost from ecommerce platforms?
We mostly recommend creating an ecommerce website with platforms like Sellfy and Shopify, at least for a general ecommerce business.
Sellfy is especially great for an online store that sells digital and print-on-demand products, though it does allow you to sell physical products as well.
Pricing starts at $29/month or $264/year. This plan allows you to generate up to $10,000 in sales per year.
It does not include a custom domain, but it does include unlimited bandwidth and visitors, an SSL certificate, ecommerce software, and themes.
Note: You should always get your domain from a third-party domain registrar for redundancy purposes.
Sellfy also doesn’t have its own payment processing functionality, so you’ll need to use PayPal or Stripe. Pricing for PayPal is based on how your customer uses it and where you’re located in the world, but Stripe charges a fixed 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction.
Shopify is a fantastic ecommerce platform for any purpose, especially due to its library of third-party apps.
Pricing for Shopify starts at $39/month or $348/year. That’s a 25% discount on annual plans. This price includes hosting with unlimited bandwidth and visitors, a free template (though, premium ones are available), an SSL certificate, a free logo maker, and most importantly, ecommerce functionality.
It does not include a free domain, though.
Shopify has its own payment processing functionality if you don’t want to use payment options like PayPal and Stripe. They charge the standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction.
More expensive plans have lower transaction fees.
Sellfy and Shopify both offer discounts for new customers, so you can get an ecommerce store up and running today for $1 or less, plus a little extra for a custom domain.
The thing we particularly like about Sellfy is that things like print on demand products and subscriptions are included natively. You don’t need to use a third-party app like you would with Shopify.
In general, Sellfy is a better fit for content creators or those looking to setup a simple store fast. Shopify is a better fit for larger ecommerce stores.
Key ecommerce website costs
Let’s discuss different costs of an ecommerce store and why the general cost is all over the place.
These are components we’re going to discuss:
- Domain and branding
- Hosting
- SSL certificate
- Website design
- Third-party plugins and extensions
- Common ecommerce business expenses
1. Domain and branding
A domain is an important part of an ecommerce site and your business’ branding. It’s the web address your customers will enter into their browsers to visit your store directly.
Unfortunately, it’s often a premium expense, especially if you use a .com domain. While you don’t necessarily need to use a .com domain, it’s the most recognizable TLD and will be easier for your customers to remember.
Some hosts offer free domains, but many don’t or charge extra for this feature.
You can normally receive a discount on a new .com domain from a service like Namecheap if you’re a new customer, but renewals cost extra, typically, $10-$20/year.
Namecheap doesn’t charge extra for domain privacy, which prevents people from looking up personal details you’ve linked to your domain, but some charge anywhere from $1 to $10/year for this service.
Shopify charges a flat $15/year for domains you register with them, but we highly recommend registering your domain separately from whomever hosts your website.
If you build your site with Shopify but decide you want to use a different ecommerce platform some time down the line, all you need to do is build a new site elsewhere, then point your domain to that site’s servers when it’s ready.
This process involves little to no downtime for your customers.
If Shopify also hosts your domain, you’ll need to transfer your domain as well, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Your site will be down throughout the entire duration of this transfer.
Logo design
If you’re just starting out, use one of the many free logo makers available on the web.
They won’t give you unique designs as iconic as McDonald’s arches or Nike’s swoosh, but they will give you web-ready logos you can add to your website and branded products.
If you want a custom logo created by a real artist, expect to pay anywhere from $20 to $1,000 for a freelancer or thousands for a graphic design agency.
Fiverr is a popular resource small and medium-sized businesses alike use to hire freelance graphic designers.
A quick browse at Fiverr reveals most logo design listings as being around $20 to $45 with some going as low as $5.
Fiverr allows customers to review designers, which means you’re able to view each designer’s rating and past work before you commission them.
2. Hosting
Web hosting is only something you need to worry about with ecommerce if you decide not to use all-in-one platforms like Sellfy and Shopify.
All-in-one ecommerce platforms host your site for you, so hosting costs are built into the monthly fee you pay for these services.
Again, this is $29/month from Sellfy and $39/month from Shopify, at minimum.
If you decide to use WooCommerce, which requires a WordPress site, or have a custom ecommerce website design built, you’ll need to purchase hosting.
Cloud hosting is the best hosting solution for ecommerce sites. It’s scalable, which means you’ll see little to no downtime from traffic surges and DDoS attacks.
Plus, it doesn’t share resources among multiple websites, so it’s more stable.
We recommend Cloudways for WordPress and custom-built sites alike. You can pay for a cloud server powered by DigitalOcean for as little as $10/month for a site that receives little to no traffic.
Cloudways plans are customizable and pricing scales based on usage, so you’ll never pay for more than you need.
3. SSL certificate
An SSL certificate is a data file that verifies website ownership and allows the website to use encryption to protect its visitors. Websites that have an SSL certificate will have a “Connection is secure” badge and will use HTTPS in the address bar instead of HTTP.
Chrome requires websites to use HTTPS. If you visit a site that does not have an SSL certificate and HTTPS enabled, you’ll receive a warning about your connection not being secure.
Firefox has an HTTPS-only mode that allows users to block websites that do not have HTTPS enabled.
Some hosts, like Shopify, have their own SSL certificates they enable and renew on your behalf. These are built into the cost of hosting.
Let’s Encrypt is a popular free solution for SSL certificates. Many hosts partner with this service in order to offer free SSL certificates as part of their hosting packages.
These hosts either install the SSL certificate for you or make it easy to do so from their control panel.
And because installing an SSL certificate can get quite complicated for beginners, we recommend choosing a host who either does this for you, as Sellfy does, or lets you do so in a few simple clicks, as Cloudways does.
Some services may charge a premium fee for a custom SSL certificate, but this is often not worth it these days.
4. Website design
Here’s where things start to get complicated and expensive, depending on how you go about the design of your website.
When we talk about ecommerce website design, we’re talking about its look and functionality.
Here’s why ecommerce platforms are useful. Along with hosting, sites you build with these platforms have ecommerce functionalities built in. You don’t need to have things like product variants, a shopping cart and payment processing custom built by a developer.
Custom features like these can cost thousands, and you’ll always be dependent on a developer for maintenance and bug fixes. This isn’t feasible for new and small businesses.
Ecommerce platforms also have a site builder and premade themes you can use. Some themes available for Shopify cost as much as $400, but many are $200 or less.
These themes have premade designs for product pages, your shopping cart page, the checkout page and key site pages, including your homepage, blog page, about page and contact page.
Ecommerce website development that only includes design costs hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands. Prices vary among developers and are often based on your needs.
5. Third-party plugins and extensions
Costs from third-party plugins, apps and extensions are entirely optional and are dependent on the ecommerce solution you use.
For example, Sellfy doesn’t have extensions, so these costs aren’t associated with that platform.
The most popular platforms that offer third-party extensions are Shopify with its library of third-party apps and WooCommerce, which has thousands of third-party WooCommerce-specific and WordPress-centric plugins to choose from.
When you purchase custom development, your developer may even choose to develop a custom extension for your store as opposed to weaving the functionality directly into your store’s code.
Payment processing is a common use case for third-party apps. They’ll add to your payment processing costs, but they’re worth it for the opportunity to add additional payment options to your store.
There are also apps for dropshipping, marketplaces, subscriptions, product variants, shipping, search engine optimization, marketing, product reviews, upselling and more.
Most apps aren’t made by Shopify and WooCommerce, so you’ll need to pay for them separately. Some are free, but most charge a premium monthly or annual price to cover ongoing development and bug fixes.
Premium extensions cost anywhere from $20 to $200, usually per year.
6. Common ecommerce business expenses
Payment processing is an expense all ecommerce websites have to deal with, no matter if they sell physical products or digital subscriptions.
The cost is a transaction fee the payment processing service(s) you use charges. Credit card companies like Mastercard and Visa charge payment processors a fee when cards are used, and the payment processor passes that fee onto you in the form of a transaction fee.
The standard transaction fee merchants must pay per transaction is 2.9% + $0.30. So, if an order’s total is $30.15, you can expect to pay a transaction fee of $1.17 since 2.9% of $30.15 is $0.87. The additional $0.30 brings the fee’s total to $1.17.
Again, different payment processing services charge different transaction fees. You can write these off as business expenses when you do your taxes, and you can also charge a little more for products to cover them.
If you sell your own physical products, expect to pay for warehouse and order fulfillment expenses as well.
These are very hard to predict and can cost anywhere from a few hundred a month to tens of thousands of dollars per month. It all depends on where you store your inventory, how you package and ship orders, and how many staff members you need.
Marketing is another common business expense for ecommerce businesses of all sizes.
You can save on marketing costs by creating your own content, but advertising and marketing tools like email marketing software and customer relationship management software will eat at your budget.
What are your options for creating an ecommerce website?
In short, the easiest and cheapest way to create a successful ecommerce website is by creating one with ecommerce platforms like Sellfy and Shopify.
They offer free trials and discounts for new customers, so you can try each service out with very little risk.
WooCommerce for WordPress is also a great option if you need a little more freedom with your design but don’t want to hire a developer.
There are numerous page builders and theme builders available for WordPress, which gives you more control over your design even without knowing how to code.
If you have the budget or can secure funding, you can shop around for a developer if you feel you need a custom design, but most ecommerce businesses do just fine with an all-in-one ecommerce platform.