How To Plan Budget For Your Ecommerce?

A new eCommerce website is emerging every day. There are currently twelve to 24 million eCommerce websites on the web. With an ocean of informative YouTube videos and easy access to the internet, it has become effortless to create a website.

However, creating an eCommerce website and running an eCommerce business — through that site — are two different things. Where creating just asks for an internet connection and a domain name, running an online store asks for planning eCommerce website pricing and careful investments.

More than 22% of the eCommerce startups fail within a year due to a lack of planning and lack of knowledge about the online industry. So, if you’re someone who is planning to start his/her eCommerce website, then do not forget to follow the tips and tick mark the checklist mentioned below.

Ecommerce Website Pricing — Planning and Budgeting the Initial Website

Don’t be fooled by the people who say that you can build your eCommerce website within $50. There’s no such thing as that. Therefore, you must keep aside a chunk of your capital to invest in building your eCommerce website.

eCommerce website pricing goes much higher than any informal website as it requires complex settings that involve building various product pages, integrating shipping and payment processing gateways, and providing genuine security protocols to protect consumers’ data.

Choosing a web hosting platform

eCommerce website pricing will vary from provider to provider that you choose as your eCommerce platform. The leading two eCommerce platforms are WooCommerce and Shopify.

WooCommerce

It is a free, open-source platform built on WordPress. Though free, it comes with additional costs including hosting, a domain name, and security. The prices are very reasonable with a charge of only $50-$100 per extension every year. You are free to customize your website as there are no formal restrictions.

The only drawback here is that WooCommerce isn’t beginner-friendly. If you are not familiar with coding, then it might be challenging for you to build your online store here. However, this can be easily taken care of if you hire a professional to do it for you — you may include this in your plan of eCommerce website pricing.

Shopify

Shopify, on the other hand, isn’t that complicated even if you are an amateur. With its 24/7 friendly customer support, it’s pretty easier to work with them. Unlike WooCommerce, Shopify isn’t free and you’ll have to pay for your Shopify account to build your website.

However, Shopify includes security and hosting. It gives you a clear breakdown of charges per month based on the features you acquire which makes budget planning for your eCommerce website easier as now you have a laydown of the costs you need to pay for. Shopify also allows you to integrate with other channels like Amazon, FB, Pinterest, etc. The only drawback here is its high cost and transaction fees for using any other payment gateway except Shopify payments.

Designing your website

You can either choose o pick from already created templates that your eCommerce platform has, or you can choose to create your design. So, what’s the better option here that fits best for your eCommerce website pricing? Try asking questions like:

• How complex and customized your design is?
• How much do you find your design worth using?
• How much is it costing you to customize your design?

These questions will help you manage your budget planning for your eCommerce website.

Differentiating Template Designs and Custom Designs

Template design

Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer pre-designed templates for beginners to start with. Customizing an already designed template can be a lot more economical as it doesn’t need the efforts from scratch. This can help you balance your eCommerce website pricing budget and allow you to invest in various other areas. It’s also helpful to get you started quickly if you wish to channel your products as soon as your website is ready.

Customized design

A customized design asks for a web designer to build every single element from scratch. If you have a set budget as per your eCommerce website pricing, then it becomes usually pretty expensive if you are hiring a professional to do that. And, at the same time, it takes a lot of time too as it isn’t easy to build a website and make it up and running in a few days.

There might come some errors and might be some important actions that you could forget to integrate. In a nutshell, it is a lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming process. However, once completed, you get the design that you’ve always dreamt of — pretty worth it!

Final verdict for template v/s customized website design

In my opinion, no matter how good your business plan is and how flexible your budget is for your eCommerce website pricing, you never know if your online business is going to fly or fall until and unless you step into the competition.

Hence, it is better to start with the templates. Now, if you see your business growing and you’ve generated enough profit, then you may plan a budget for your eCommerce website that’ll have your customized design.

Integrating the payment process

Setting up a payment gateway is a necessary part of building your eCommerce website. Hence, the costs it might come with are also important to be considered while budgeting eCommerce website pricing. These payment merchants will allow you to process bank cards or any other online payment options that your customers would be used to make payments.

Generally, the processing fees vary from 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction to more or less depending on the volume. The most common payment gateways you should consider providing are:

• All bank cards
• Paypal
• Stripe
• Amazon Pay

Other Regular and Irregular Expenses

The initial building of your eCommerce website, with no doubt, is going to be the most costly expense. Hence, this cost is very much significant to consider when planning the budget for your eCommerce website. Apart from what you invest in the beginning, you are still liable to keep investing in your website throughout your operating years.

Here, I ain’t just talking about the expenses related to the products (inventory, shipping, product marketing, etc.), but wholly about your eCommerce website. Let me show you what I am talking about.

Monitoring security

Online shoppers are most concerned about their information security when they ate asked to be given their payment details and other infographics. Hence, you must run full security on every end through which your customer interacts with your website. Hence, a regular checkup and maintenance of your website to keep it secure are very important.

Photography and image editing

For your website to be engaging and captivating, you are required to add the images of your products as well as the website images — that make your website look beautiful and professional.

This requires regular updating as you can’t use the same website layout and images during the holiday season, and you can use outdated images as long as your website operates. Therefore, showing a clean, alluring website and product images on your eCommerce website is utterly essential. Plan a budget for your website that covers this expense too.

Another important thing you are required to reckon as your budget for your eCommerce website pricing is image editing. You can’t simply click the images and post them online without touching them up — or simply saying, without being Photoshopped.

This may sound like a lot to spend, but only this can take you a long way. You need to understand that it’s not only important to keep the buyers engaged, BUT, your competitors are doing it too.

Hiring professional product photo editing services like PixelPhant is always a smart investment as it saves a lot of time and helps in generating reliable conversion rates. If your images aren’t attractive then there is little or no chance that the shoppers are even going to explore your site even further.

Content creation

Content is immensely important for your website. It includes what you write about yourself, the things that you write for your website policies, as well as the things you write as your product descriptions.

Lame or unprofessional content can affect the goodwill that you are trying to build for your website. Hence your eCommerce website pricing must include the budget that you will be required to pay to your content writers.

Marketing

Did I say that your marketing is only going to be for the products that you’re selling? I guess not. Marketing is not just going to work for your products, but for your website too. Now, what budget planning will it be asking for. These will include things like:

• SEO (Payment to the SEO team)
• SEM
• Social media campaigns
• PPC investments
• Email marketing, etc.

You can choose how much are you willing to spend on your brand’s marketing.

Other expenses

There are many kinds of expenses that you might incur in the course of your online business. These are not the same for any business and vary according to what you choose to invest in.

Wrapping Up

Planning the budget for building your initial eCommerce website will be the most crucial and probably one of the biggest investments you will be required to plan during your eCommerce website pricing. And, it is kind of important too to put your money in it as your website is something that is going to work for you 24/7 without any breaks or holidays.

Hence, it is essential to make it user-friendly, engaging, and safe. All the other expenses that are mentioned in this article depend on what you choose and how much you find it worth to put your money into it.

eCommerce website pricing is paramount to kickstart a healthy business that runs successfully for ages. So, whenever you think of commencing your eCommerce website, be sure that you plan a budget for your eCommerce website rather than blindly throwing the arrows in the dark that holds a little chance of success.