The budget of designing an online shopping website for your business depends upon the time investment you can make and the efforts you like to put. The fundamental investment will be buying a domain, hosting services, security certification, i.e., SSL, and backup services only. The budget for these basics will go between $150-$200 over a year. The rest of the addition in the budget will be for website development, and it will depend upon the functionalities that you like to add.
To design and develop your online shopping website, you can choose custom web development, online website builders, as well as ecommerce platforms. We will be telling you the budget for each of them distinctly.
Online Shopping website development with open-source platforms
You can rely on open-source CMS platforms like WordPress, Magento, and numerous others if you have the technical knowledge and want to build your store on your own from scratch. You can learn and implement your knowledge for custom development as well. But it will take a lot of time. Unless you are a perfectionist, you will surely make errors, which can be threatening for your business. That’s why we recommend you do not select this option unless you are a website developer or techno-brains.
Investment: Domain + web hosting + SSL certification
In addition to all the functionalities, you can connect plugins as per the features you like to add to your store. The cost of themes and that of plugins will be added separately if they happen to be paid.
Ecommerce store development with an online store builder
More accessible than the custom-web development, you can check for online website builder tools and software. These tools are either paid or allowed to be used with the freemium plans. You can pay recurring charges to use the platform to build your ecommerce store. There will not be any additional services for your website. However, you can select the themes from the extensive collection of free and paid themes. You can rely on paid and unpaid plugins to add some new features to your store. The website builder tools are straightforward to use, as they are designed for non-tech brains. Some of these tools allow you to register, create your store, and connect your domain as well, only in paid plans like Wix. There are some other
Investment: Domain(if you want personalized store domain) + hosting (if not offered in the plan) + SSL certification (if not provided) + Themes (for paid themes)
Design your store with Ecommerce platforms
In contrast to online store builders, ecommerce platforms are more promising in designing and managing your ecommerce store. By registering your business with the ecommerce platform, you will get access to online store builders and all necessary features to streamline your business. This will save you from the trouble of finding distinctive features and checking with the plugins. You can update settings from the general settings section.
The budget will roughly go from $30 – $300/ month and can be more depending upon the features and business requirements. In contrast to open-source platforms and ecommerce store builders, you need not worry about hosting plans and domains, unless you want to. The website’s up-time will be 97-99%, and you will be given unlimited storage space to manage the media elements.
The design layout will be easier to use, even for laymen. For your ecommerce store, you can select the theme of your choice as well as one that goes well with your business niche. In case you want access to the source code of the theme, you can purchase one that goes well with your notion of business.
The renowned ecommerce platforms are Shopify, Builderfly, BigCommerce, Weebly, Squarespace, and many others.
How can Builderfly help you build your business?
Builderfly’s Startup plan is one of the fantastic options for startup businesses. Youthpreneurs can consider registering their business under a startup plan and claim lifetime free access to their store with one-time activation fees of $100. The ecommerce enthusiast can register the business and start building an ecommerce store with a niche-specific theme. There are ready-to-implement templates for every section of the store that can be used to give a unique look to your store. You need not worry about hosting plans distinctly, as your website will be hosted on the server with 99.99% of uptime. With unlimited storage space, it will not be tricky for you.
We know that you like to add a personal touch to your store and give you access to HTML/CSS code. You can tweak the designs and personalize it by adding sections and sub-sections of your choice. By linking the payment gateway and configuring your store with shipment settings, you can make your store ready to launch.
Further, you can count subscription-based plans ranging from $35-$195 to take your business and design your m-commerce app along with. You can register for free and understand the usability requirement of all the features under the free trial period of 14-days.