How much does it cost to develop an eCommerce website? It’s a tricky question because there are many aspects that can impact the final development cost. Moreover, if you want to create a custom e-commerce platform with a wide variety of features, the final cost will be much higher than if you choose to build your business on a pre-made solution.
This article is an ultimate guide that will explain to you how much it costs to make an eCommerce website, what features should be in it, what is the price, and tech stack.
Average Development Cost
In a word, the average development cost of an e-commerce website starts from $26,400 to $42,350 and beyond. These numbers are relevant for the websites built from scratch. Websites built with pre-made solutions will be much cheaper (but these websites will suit you only for short term needs).
Let’s divide all eCommerce websites into two categories, based on their feature list and complexity.
What Can Affect the Development Cost
There are four factors that can raise your eCommerce site development cost.
- Features, their amount and complexity
- Design complexity
- 3rd party integrations and their amount
- The chosen development team and its location
Let’s take a closer look at each factor.
Features, Their Amount and Complexity
Things are simple. The more complex features you want, the higher price you will pay for the development. To make all things clear, here’s an example. Payment management is a pretty sophisticated feature that will take 39 hours for development and will cost $1,950. Meantime, registration will take only 11 hours and will cost $550 due to its overall implementation simplicity.
We will calculate the final development cost based on all pages and features that we want to implement. Let’s make a shortlist of them.
Must-have pages of eCommerce site are:
- Main page
- Shopping cart
- Favorites
- Check out page
- Blog
- Category pages
- Product pages
Meantime, the must-have eCommerce features are:
- Payment integration
- Push notifications
- Recently viewed goods
- Rating and reviews
- Search bar with filters
- Administrator panel
Design Complexity
Website design is the first thing that all clients notice and, based on the design, evaluate what the site has to offer them. It takes time to create website design with various animations. The more time development takes, the higher the final cost will be. Moreover, if you want to have a choice between several website design concepts, designers must prepare them, so be prepared for bigger cost numbers.
The approximate development time of custom website design is 65 hours, and if we multiply this number by the average hourly rate in Ukraine of $50, we’ll get $3,250 for the UI/UX development.
If you want to make your website look pretty on mobile devices, adaptive design is your choice that will make rendered website pages look good on various screens. The development of adaptive design will take about 38 hours, and it will cost you $1,900.
Amount of 3rd Party Integrations
Let’s begin with payment integrations like Stripe or Paypal.
Both Stripe and PayPal charge 2.9% + 30¢ per successful transaction besides that PayPal charges 5% + .05¢ for each payment under $10. The integration of these payment methods will take around 10-12 hours and will cost around $500-$600.
Let’s assume that you decided to add a bot that will send SMS, WhatsApp messages, and make calls to customers. There is a good tool for that occasion named Twilio. Twilio has its own price list for each operation:
- Sending WhatsApp messages costs $0.0042 for each massage
- Sending and receiving SMS costs $0.0075 for each SMS
- Receiving and making calls costs $0.0085/min and $0.013/min accordingly
Moreover, developers need time to add these features to the website, and it takes from 4 to 6 hours and will cost around $200-$300.
The whole picture is obvious. More 3rd party tools involved in eCommerce websites means more time for implementation, and all these aspects lead to increased expenses.
Developers and Their Whereabouts
Development cost strongly depends on the location of your chosen development team. Development services in Eastern Europe are much cheaper than the same services in the US or Western Europe.
To make things clear, we’ll show you average hourly rates for software development in various countries.
Moreover, be prepared for extra expenses that are vital for website functioning:
- Domain (from $10 to $20 annually)
- Hosting (from $100 to $200)
- SSL certificate (from $6 to $150)
- Website maintenance (from $500 to $12,000)
And the final thing. To make your site visible, you should take care of the marketing side, which requires a certain amount of spending.
- PPC advertising (keywords demand is the main aspect that affects the price)
- SEO optimization (average monthly price vary from $300 to $1,500)
- Copywriting (from $50 and above for each article)
- SMM (the price starts from $400 monthly)
Estimate Based on Features
Let’s make a precise estimate of eCommerce website development by every feature that will be implemented.
How much does it cost to develop an eCommerce website with MVP features only?
Let’s assume that there’s a need to add more complex features.
Now, it’s time for a small conclusion. The development of an eCommerce website requires $28,200. This price consists of MVP features and sophisticated features only. Web design is a separate expense item.
That price is relevant to Ukraine. Let’s see how much it costs to develop a website with the same MVP features in other countries. Our formula consists of 403 development hours multiplied on the hourly rate.
- Eastern Europe — $50/h ($20,150)
- Western and Central Europe — $100/h ($40,300)
- USA — $150/h ($60,450)
- Australia — $100/h ($40,300)