Frankly Speaking, E-commerce website development can be started as low as $200, where you can use WordPress or Shopify and it can go up to millions of Dollars for a platform like Amazon which is really huge and require thousands of developers daily to maintain.
Hey Everybody, I am Yateesh Bhardwaj, founder of Benchwork Technologies, a Website and Mobile Apps Development Enterprise based in Noida, India. I have been helping my clients in understanding and developing their technology needs with the QCD approach.
So guys, before we will start discussing the E-commerce Website and Mobile Apps development Costs and their time, we should understand the factors affecting their cost & development time.
- Daily Average Users(DAU)– Many of you have heard this term before. DAU is an important metric which is a deciding factor for the technology selection of the E-commerce platform. Higher the number of average users visiting and purchasing product, higher will be the cost of Hosting and managing servers.
- Product Niche– Many of you might be thinking that how can product niche will affect the cost of the development. Let me help you in understanding about it. When you are selling a niche product, you are actually thinning your customer pipeline. It means that now you will have a very selected range of customers. Not everybody who is online is your customer. It will keep in check your website requirements as compared to E-commerce giants like Amazon, e-bay, Flipkart, etc.
- Scalability :- Scalability simply means your planning to take you business to heights of Success. If you are pre-planned about the customer requirements and market segment, then your choice of technology should be different in respect if you are unaware of your Product progress and you are going ahead with MVP
- Monthly Website Hosting & Maintenance Cost:– Many gentleman starts their business with just thought of selling online without given a thinking on the right technology selection, monthly hosting & maintenance cost of website which can go higher than your margins and will lead you to a huge loss and certainly closing down of your business.
Though there are many other factors that are also important but all of them are somehow linked to the above ones. So without delaying the time, let us understand the essential features of any E-commerce website in the world. Let me list them here.
For Users
- User Login- Social Login & Email login
- User Signup- Social Signup & Email Signup
- View All Product
- View Product Details
- Add Products to Cart
- Delete Product from Cart
- Modify products in Cart
- Checkout & place order
- Payment Gateway
- My Orders
- Cancel Orders
- Return Orders
- Coupon Code Functionality
For Admin
- Admin Login
- Add & Manage Products
- Add & Manage Product Collections
- Add & Manage Vendors
- View & Manage Vendor’s Product
- View & Manage Orders
- View & Manage Team
- View & Manage Transactions records
For Vendors
- Vendor Login
- Add Products
- View & Manage Orders
- View & Manage Transactions
Though these are the essential functionalities of an E-commerce platform that are required at any point in time irrespective of any Business Model. There are other features as well which are also required but they depends on Business model of your E-commerce website. Not everyone needs them that’s why I have not listed them here.
Now let’s talk about the development Process required as per your business model. Every Software in the world goes through a very simple Software Development Life Cycle:-
- Requirements Gathering
- Architecture Design and Technical Documentation
- Product Development
- Product Testing
- Product Deployment
Though this process flow seems to be very clean and easy, it has its own challenges and definitions. During the requirements gathering, a Development Company gets a clear understanding of what you actually want. It will define whether you really need a Product Like Amazon or a simple Shopify Website. Let us discuss different Cost evaluations of the final product.
- Shopify– If you are looking to scale your business, like everyone do then an average monthly cost of Shopify is $300/month. In addition to it, you also need plugins and a developer to maintain and develop it. So the average cost of the product on a monthly basis is $1000/month(Hosting+Developer Salary+Plugins+Miscellaneous).
- WordPress– WordPress provides you a plugin called Woo-commerce to develop your E-commerce platform over wordpress. Many of my clients have faced difficulties in scaling their Business through wordpress. In wordpress, you need an average $100/month hsoting+ $100 for a theme + $20-$25/hour for a WordPress developer+ You also need some paid plugins to fulfill your needs. So a total of around $800-900 will go for this as well.
- Customized Development Solutions– I have only mentioned Shopify and Wordress for your reference. But there are many other opensource plaforms which are also there into market like Open Cart, Magento, nopCommerce, etc. These all platforms require highly skilled development team and also you need to maintain the hosting cost on any Cloud platform like Amazon Web Services or Google cloud.
We at Benchwork Technologies, really believes that every Business should have its own E-commerce platform which should be customisable and Scalable as per the business needs.
A customized product can be developed somewhere around $8000-$10000 but this cost is really worth for a Business as they are the real owners of their product and they can get trademark for their intellectual property. Checkout the E-commerce product which we have developed for an Indian client.
Development time for any customised E-commerce requires somewhere around 2-3 months but it can be reduced through Agile Approach.
I hope I have been able to clarify most of your doubts about E-commerce and its development cycle. We are here to always help our clients in running their businesses through Technology. You can approach us at contact@benchwork.in or reach out to me through Linkedin anytime. You can check our portfolio here.