If you are planning to build an e-commerce website for your business, the right time to do that is now. There has been significant growth in the eCommerce industry over the last few years and it’s showing no signs of slowing down in the near future.
Below are some of the major advantages of running an e-commerce store:
- Convenience: E-commerce websites make it convenient for online shoppers to buy their desired stuff from anywhere, anytime! At the same time, it’s convenient for business owners to manage different business areas through a single website.
- Affordable: eCommerce website development is affordable as compared to setting up a physical retail store.
Additionally, the recurring expenses involved in maintaining an online store is much cheaper than running a physical store. As a result, business owners can sell their products at a cheaper price for the customers. - Coverage: With an eCommerce website, you can sell your products to even those regions or countries where you do not have any physical presence. In other words, your online store can help you to reach the masses.
Having said above, it’s definitely worthwhile to invest your time and money and build an e-commerce business.
But before you begin your eCommerce website development, you must make sure to seek quotations from different web developers so that you can get the best deal.
If this is the first time that you are building an e-commerce store, you may be wondering what does an e-commerce website quotation comprises.
Perhaps, you may want to know what are the things that a website developer considers while making an e-commerce website quote.
In this blog post, I have shared 6 things that an e-commerce developer considers while drafting a proposal or quotation for you.
Let’s get started!
#1 Web development platform
The selection of platform/CMS to build an e-commerce website can significantly affect your e-commerce quote. Therefore, a website developer would always consider the web development platform as one of the major factors while drafting a web design quote for you.
For instance, choosing WordPress CMS over custom PHP development can lower down your website development cost.
If you have any preference for the platform that you want to choose for your e-commerce store development, you must share with your developer so that he can consider it while making an e-commerce web design quote.
#2 Products uploading
If you want your website developer to upload all the products for you, he will have to take an additional cost into consideration while making your quotation.
The charges to upload the products on your e-commerce store depends on the number of products you are looking at.
If you are on a budget, you can ask your web developer to exclude the cost of product uploading which will help to reduce your website development cost. Instead, you can take a short training and learn to manage the products yourself.
At Innomedia, we offer free products uploading for up to 50 products to the e-commerce website that we build for them.
#3 Website hosting
Website hosting is another thing that your web developer needs to consider while drafting an eCommerce website proposal for you.
Adding a website hosting package will increase the cost of your e-commerce web design quotation. The exact cost of your website hosting depends on the package that you want to subscribe to. In other words, it depends on several things such as:
- Type of web hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated hosting.
- Web hosting space/storage.
- Any additional features that you need such as daily backups, SSL, etc.
#4 Third party integrations
There are several third party features that you may need to integrate with your online store in order to automate the whole process of your business.
For example, you may want to incorporate:
- XERO: The accounting software that will help you to synchronize all of your transactions.
- MailChimp: The email marketing software that helps you to collect the emails of your customers and send them promotional emails.
- Salesforce: A CRM tool to strengthen your retail management system effectively.
- Live Chat: A chatting widget to let your customers connect to you without calling or emailing you.
Depending on the complexity of work involved in the integration of these third-party tools, your web developer may update your e-commerce website proposal.
#5 Special requirements
All the businesses are different. So are their requirements.
There can’t be a standard website development proposal for all the businesses because the requirements may vary. Now these special requirements have to be considered by your website designer while preparing an e-commerce quote for you.
What kind of special requirements we are talking about?
- You may need on your e-commerce store customized products’ calculations based on different parameters that users will input.
- You may need your developer to integrate a local payment gateway instead of standard or most commonly used gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, etc.
- You may want to offer customized loyalty points or reward points to your customers. In this case, your developer may have to update his proposal accordingly.
- Not all business owners need to integrate shipping APIs with their e-commerce websites, but in your case, you may need it.
#6 Website maintenance
Do you need your developer to maintain your website as well? If yes, then this could be another thing that your developer may have to consider & include in your e-commerce website proposal.
Your developer could offer you the maintenance packages for 6 months or 1 year. Whichever the case, adding the maintenance cost to your e-commerce web design proposal will definitely increase the cost of your website development.
But at the end of day, website maintenance is as important as your website development in the first place.
Why hiring a developer for website maintenance is so important?
- To secure your website from different kinds of potential threats.
- To regularly update your website with the latest information.
- To upload new products every week or month.
- To optimize the loading speed of your website.
- To remove unnecessary plugins or codes on your website.
- To keep the latest & fully-functional backups of your website.
- To do minor changes to your website.
- To get support from your web designer, when you need it urgently.