The monetary involvement in building a store is not a lot, but the time and efforts required are something of huge worth.
The skills that you own and the functionalities that you want to add to your store will decide the budget for your ecommerce store.
Earlier, it used to cost a fortune to make a simple website live, let the commerce store be left alone. But that’s not the case now!
All thanks to technology to make things more comfortable as well as approachable. To build your online store and design as per your business needs, you can opt for either of the available options. The initial and most common approach to design your store is, purchasing a domain, hosting it, and selecting an open-source platform to get your store designed. You can optimize the budget in this case, but you need technical skills for this. Else, you have to hire an e-commerce developer to code your store from scratch. For those of you running out of the budget of development, you can opt for e-commerce platforms to resolve your issues.
We will guide you through the budget requirement in all cases. Before selecting either of these options, you need to buy a domain first. The domain of your store can be the brand name of your business, or it can be a different one. The cost of the domain will depend upon its reach and brand-able nature. On a rough note, it will cost you $10-$12/ year, excluding taxes. The timely offer can help you save some more amount, and if you like to bid for any business name, you will have to pay some more.
Building your store with open-source frameworks:
When you like to take this option, you have already decided to handle every task of creating a successful store on your own. Firstly, you need to buy a domain, take the hosting services, and then hire a developer to create your store from scratch. You can create your store on your own if you are technically sound with all the necessary knowledge of coding. Don’t merely experiment, as the ecommerce business promises a lot more than you are thinking.
The budget for making a fully-functional store depends on the type of services that you opt for. You can check the hosting plans from the website you bought your domain. However, it’s a choice to choose the service of theirs or that of other companies. As a startup, the basic plan to host your store will be enough for you.
But is that all you need?
You need to be a bit far-sighted here! For expert assistance, talk to the support team of hosting service provider companies. Consider the expected traffic on your ecommerce store, storage space, and SSL certification if offered with the plan. These factors can help you compare the plan and select the best one that suffices your needs. It will cost you $5-$80/ month or above depending on the hosting viz shared, dedicated, or cloud-based.
The benefit of using an open-source platform is, it is free-to-use. If you are a web developer who is aiming to take a call on creating an online business, it is the best option to go ahead with. Your net investment will be $7-$10/ month and which isn’t huge. But, if you want to get your ecommerce store developed with the help of professionals, you must have a fancy budget. The price range will depend upon the features you want to add and the company you will approach.
Building your store with Website Builder:
The website builder tool is the online software that gives you access to WYSIWYG editor to create and customize your store on your own, without any knowledge of coding. It’s an alternative for the website development services by replacing them with the professionally built themes and web pages.
You have to buy your domain name and hosting services from the external domain and hosting service providers. You can connect your domain and build your store. For a website builder tool, you can set the budget of $0-25/month, in addition to domain and hosting.
You may adore website builders for the reasons that they have an intuitive user interface and empowers you with the power of designing your ecommerce store. Also, you will be offered the necessary plugins to make your store functional. But, you will not be able to customize each and every section of it. The website builder tools are there to help newbies get an online presence. To get advanced functionalities, you either have to take the assistance from experts of the website builder tool or need to invest in the paid plugins or themes.
Do you want to save yourself from all the troubles of finding different tools and plugins to increase the functionality of your store?
Don’t worry, ecommerce platforms are here!
Design your store with e-commerce platforms
The budget for creating an e-commerce store ranges from $35 to $200/month. It is a subscription-based service to build a store without wondering much about the best plans to build your store. You pay only for the features that you want to add to your pocket. So, you can decide the business plan as per your budget, rather than finding the cost-cutting options in different services. The primary benefit of selecting a commerce platform to create your store is, it will help you streamline your business in addition to bringing it online. The e-commerce platform is colossal of ecommerce related services to run your business successfully. It will give you access to:
- Store builder: The ecommerce store builder section of your ecommerce platform helps you build your store with basic as well as advanced themes. You can check for both paid/unpaid themes in the marketplace section of that ecommerce platform. The easy-to-use store builder won’t need any technical knowledge to create the store, and it lets you customize each section as per your choice. After checking the basic differentiating features of each of the ecommerce platforms you are comparing, take a 14-days free trial to check the level of customisation each of these platforms are offering. Some ecommerce platforms like Builderfly allow you access to HTML/CSS code to make specific changes in the backend. Also, we let you choose the design template that you like to apply for different sections of your web store.
- Sales channel’s management: The ecommerce platform lets you integrate your existing and additional sales channels to your store. You add your social commerce channels like Facebook and Instagram. You can link your ecommerce channels like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Google Marketplace to your store. In this way, you can manage your orders, update inventory, and upload catalog from the single dashboard. It will reduce a lot of those repetitive tasks that you have been managing distinctly on each of these channels.
- Customer management: Be it an offline business or online, customer is the nucleus of the business. The integrated CRM in the ecommerce platforms help you collect all the necessary databases of customers which can be further used for the purpose of marketing and business analysis. It plays a crucial role in improving the customer service of your store and understanding the behaviour of customers. Based on the customer’s choices, you can up-sell and cross-sell the products and improve customer loyalty.
- Marketing automation tools: Your ecommerce store is nothing without marketing. To market well, you will look for several marketing tools to optimize your campaigns as well as automate the marketing. Being a newbie in the business industry, you may not know the tools that work well and others that doesn’t. The ecommerce platforms integrate the tested and applied tools at their store to help you through your business. This will save your time and effort in checking for the free tools to promote your business. You can count on features like email marketing, cart abandonment, coupon and discount logs, newsletter creator, and so on.
If you are yet to create your ecommerce store, we recommend you to opt Builderfly instead. The reason is, Builderfly lets you launch your native mobile app, in addition to the web store. Thus, it doubles the chances of inviting more customers to your store. The most important of all, it enables the integration of AI to your store that guarantees personlize experience to your customers. You can also get your store ready in 3 minutes without payment of recurring charges if you fit in the Builderfly’s startup plan. To know more, you can reach us at support@builderfly.com.
