The Average Cost of Ecommerce Website Development

The end goal of any website, ecommerce or otherwise, is conversion.  As a business owner, you want your users to positively engage with your brand, and one of the best ways to do that is to provide them with a painless way to purchase your products or services online.  We have experience with ecommerce at every level, from non-profit donations-driven organizations to enterprise-level ecommerce platforms, and the first major question is almost always cost.  We’ve put together some data on average pricing for ecommerce sites at three different levels – let’s take a look!

The data we’re using is divided into two sets – costs related to SaaS (Software as a Service) vs traditional managed ecommerce.  The current largest SaaS ecommerce platform is Shopify, which is a great way to get a simple ecommerce site online with minimal upfront cost.  The biggest drawback to most (if not all) SaaS ecommerce platforms is twofold – customization and scalability.  While it is possible to grow a large ecommerce site using a platform like Shopify, the low cost-of-entry quickly disappears (premium Shopify accounts for large sites currently cost $299+ per month, for example) and functionality at larger scales takes a significant hit.

Traditional managed ecommerce has a greater upfront cost, but is exponentially more future-proof and scalable than its SaaS counterpart due to the fact that the entire platform is self-hosted.  That means you and your development/management team control every aspect of the site, and can easily add functionality or scale to the entire site as needed without extra technical hurdles or prohibitive costs.

While we are happy to work with either option based on the client’s needs, we almost always recommend starting out with a managed ecommerce platform.  While the upfront cost is higher, expenses are actually cut dramatically when it comes time to scale up or customize the site to make the overall experience easier for your customers.

We’ve broken down the data based on services, total upfront cost and total annual cost for small, medium, and large online stores.  Let’s take a look at the numbers!

These are national averages for most ecommerce sites over the last two years and not reflective of our pricing model, however, it’s a good metric if you’re thinking of expanding your business to ecommerce and curious about the price tag.  All of our ecommerce project quotes are custom based on the client’s needs and future plans for the business, and in almost all cases we are able to save you money on both upfront setup/design and annual costs.  Get in touch with us today and let’s talk about how we can get your business selling online!