Ecommerce Solutions on a Budget? It’s Not as Hard as You Think
Many of the businesses are now deciding to create online stores this year. If you have an ecommerce store, then an ecommerce solution or website is everything to drive traffic to your website and increase sales. The customers don’t need to wait for the store to open and need to visit physically. Shopping online is popular nowadays and most people are using the internet because of it. They will go to your online ecommerce store and can place orders anytime from any place.
When we think about an ecommerce store, we need to know how much we need to invest in establishing the ecommerce store and in return what we will get. Most of the time, at the earlier stage, many entrepreneurs think to invest too little into their ecommerce solution while expecting a large return of investment. But if you want to start with realistic goals, try to contact different ecommerce solutions providers and come to know about the prices to build the online ecommerce stores. Definitely, in this way you can be successful to launch your ecommerce business online by establishing the good identity of your brand. So before starting an ecommerce business, just sit down and take a deep breath and think about where you need to start. I am sharing the following tips that will help to better plan your ecommerce store and the budget for the startup costs.
How to do budgeting for the initial mock-up?
Building an ecommerce store online requires an enormous amount of investment instead of creating and designing a simple informational website because there is a lot of complexity involved within the systems. So you need to consider many factors while creating pages for your products and services, including security protocols for protecting the customer’s data, shipping, and implementing a payment processing gateway. All of this work takes a lot of time, whether you are building the website yourself or any eCommerce solutions company.
How to choose the right e-commerce platform?
Your choice for choosing the best e-commerce platform will determine your initial investment for starting the ecommerce business. The most two ecommerce platforms that are mostly used for building ecommerce businesses are:
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free platform where you can integrate seamlessly into word press. But for the implementation, you need to hire three skilled developers for implementation of the complex steps. You will also need the different WooCommerce extensions or plugins which can cost anywhere from $100 to $200. The characteristics of this platform are that it is an open-source platform and where a hundred developers and web teams have great expertise in this technology.
Shopify is also the best ecommerce platform where you need to pay for a Shopify account to build your ecommerce store. But the drawback of this platform is that you avail the limited features of the ecommerce platform and there are no customizations you can do. So, take your time and choose which platform is right for you to build the ecommerce platform.
How to choose template vs. custom design?
After choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business, you need to decide which approach would be best for you to choose the built-in- template or custom design. If you go for the custom design to differentiate your business from other competitors, flexibility, and want to actively update your website regularly, then you need a lot of investment and time. So choosing the custom design for your build the online ecommerce store will probably make more sense.
How to choose a payment gateway?
After all this process, you need to choose a payment gateway that helps you process the credits card on the website. Your choice of payment for choosing the right payment gateway will affect the ongoing costs. The three options that I will recommend you to choose the payment gateway are:
- Stripe
- Paypal
- Authorize.net
How do you plan for long-term costs?
eCommerce solutions also need a long-term cost for the working of the website properly and smoothly. The cost often includes the
- Web hosting
- SSL Certificate
- Security monitoring
- Regular maintenance and development support
Your choice of choosing the ecommerce platform also affects the monthly payments of building the e-commerce website. If you are going to choose Shopify, you need to pay every month. Or if you choose WooCommerce, then you need to pay for the development and adaptation of plugins to your website. If you have an appropriate budget, then I will recommend contacting SW3 Solutions. We dedicate SW3 Solutions to provide web development services, ecommerce solutions, mobile apps development, web hosting, and domain registration.
