While offline selling is still prevalent today, an online presence is becoming a prerogative for almost every sector. If in the pre-pandemic period, having an online store was considered only an alternative, today the possession of e-commerce is necessary for any seller who wants to expand their clientele and quickly reach a large number of people.
However, just as a physical store requires a number of fixed costs, starting an online sales site should also be considered a real investment. The costs of e-commerce mainly depend on the business goals you intend to pursue and how much you are willing to invest in order to achieve them.
This means that building eCommerce sites does not involve fixed prices, but they can fluctuate significantly from top to bottom due to a very large number of variables, which we will look at specifically in a few minutes.
Speaking about the development of an eCommerce store, we should not forget about the importance of Magento maintenance services that we can provide you.
What do you need to open e-commerce?
As we said in the introductory paragraph, if you intend to open an e-commerce business, there are several aspects to consider, and each of them is associated with costs, which can be more or less small depending on what we plan to do.
In particular, the costs of an e-commerce site relate to:
- hosting and domain
- CMS
- Cookies and privacy policy
- Graphics and customization
- Logistics
- Marketing and SEO activity
Some of these aspects need to be addressed right away, while others (related to marketing) may be reassessed over time, including taking into account needs that may arise in the long term.
In any case, when you decide to invest in e-commerce, it is good not to underestimate any of these points, because, although in different ways, they will all affect the final cost of our online sales site.
Let’s now look at each item in detail.
Hosting and Domain Costs
The prices associated with e-commerce certainly include hosting and domain prices, the two main elements required to start your own online store.
However, just as renting a store comes with a monthly cost, even “staying” online isn’t free. The cost you have to face in order to use the space for your website varies from a few euros to around ten euros per month, and generally, the total cost is affected by the type of services included in the offer and the amount of space reserved.
In addition to this, the user is also responsible for another important decision, which is to choose between:
- shared hosting: in this case, server resources (such as space) are shared among multiple websites. This type of hosting is cheaper than dedicated hosting but still has many disadvantages. Among the most common:
- if a site that shares the same server as you makes the latter unavailable, then your e-commerce may also be unavailable
- performance is lower than dedicated hosting
- the so-called resale phenomenon is likely to occur, i.e. too many sites using the same server slow it down.
- The IP address is shared and therefore, in the event of a problem, all those using this IP address will pay for the consequences.
- dedicated hosting: here the server is available for a single website and is located on a server farm managed by providers who personally take care of the hardware interventions requested by the users. This solution allows the user to install on his server all the services and software required for his site and enjoy a more secure and more productive computer than the one available on shared hosting. However, these advantages come at a price, and it is certainly higher than the solution we presented in the previous paragraph.
In addition to hosting, platforms that offer this service also allow you to purchase a domain. To paraphrase building terms, if hosting is the lot where you will live, then the domain is the name of the street where you will be available.
When we talk about a website domain, what we really mean is the name that your IP address is associated with.
On what platform should you create an online store from scratch
The second step to face when starting an eCommerce business is choosing a CMS you can rely on. By CMS (content management system) we mean the web platform with which we will manage the content of our site. In the case of e-commerce, there are many types of CMS you can rely on, and choosing the right one can have important implications in terms of sales and performance.
So how do you get out of the complex (and competitive) world of e-commerce CMS? To try and provide you with concrete assistance, we have decided to provide you with a list of four well-known big names in the market:
- WooCommerce
- Prestashop
- Shopify
- Magento
Our company Dinarys believes that each platform is more suitable for a certain type of project, but in any case, you should base your choice of CMS on a few simple basic criteria, which can be summarized in 4 points:
- budget at your disposal
- the type of goods or services you are going to sell
- variety and breadth of the range of goods that you are going to store in the warehouse
- the need to more or less highly customize your site with special graphics and certain plugins
Having said that, before asking yourself how much e-commerce costs, consider how much importance you intend to place on each individual aspect listed above. Only after you have made these considerations can you have a more or less clear idea of the costs you will have to face with your new online store.