Custom eCommerce Website Development Costs for 2022

Why Ecommerce Startups Are Promising in 2022

Many businesses have collapsed since the pandemic struck like a bolt from the blue. But not those who were already working in e-commerce or those who quickly adapted and switched to online mode.

According to the research, eCommerce experienced a significant rise due to lockdown during the pandemic. What’s more, there is no reason to think that the popularity of online shopping will decrease in the near future.

According to E-commerce trends during COVID-19 Pandemic research, “Coronavirus impacts the whole e-commerce of the world; it has changed the nature of business. According to the results obtained, 52% of consumers avoid going brick and mortar shopping and crowded areas. Furthermore, 36% avoid brick and mortar shopping until they get a coronavirus vaccine.” 

These numbers can only mean one thing - the perfect time to create an eCommerce startup is right now. However, there is one but! Soon, the competition in the online retail sector will become even more fierce; therefore:

• you need to hurry with the creation of your project;

• carefully think over your every step;

• get in touch with a reliable development vendor who will help you follow eCommerce development trends and ensure your project meets your customer's expectations.

Main Factors Influencing Custom Ecommerce Website Cost

So, what are the main factors that directly affect the eCommerce website design cost? The main thing to keep in mind is each eCommerce project is highly specific, individual, and created using a unique set of technologies and approaches. There is no one-size-fits-all development recipe, so the price and the result will be individual in every specific case.

Many essential factors influence the final price of your project. 

• The specifics of your design. Customized and trendy designs always cost more compared to the templated and out-of-the-box solutions. A lot of animated elements also make the design pricier. However, you should stick to the middle ground when it comes to the creation of your website. Sometimes, minimalistic solutions are better and cheaper. Also, there are many other specific details regarding the web design cost that will be discussed further. 

• The number of features you need to create. The more features you need to create, the more time your developers will spend, which will directly affect the final cost. The logic is clear. As for eCommerce websites, they always come with a lot of features, each of which is needed for a certain stage of the sales funnel. 

• The number of integrations and additional tools. You need two core integrations for your eCommerce project - the payment system or gateway and antifraud solutions to protect your customers’ financial and personal data. AI powers the latter tools, so they are somewhat costly but, in exchange for the price, you can be confident about your data and money safety. 

The location of your vendor. This factor matters most compared to any above. Your development company’s location and size may increase or decrease the final price by 5-10 times. So, you should be wise when choosing your development partner and try to find the best deal in terms of price, quality, experience, ease of communication, and the approach to outsourcing.

The Hourly Development to Use as a Starting Point

As you can see, the cost to build an eCommerce website will be individual in any case. Too many factors affect the final price, plus the specifics of your idea and pitfalls that may appear unexpectedly also matter. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to give even rough estimates with no initial data about your project.

However, we appreciate your desire to understand how much money you need to allocate for this venture. Therefore, let's take the average cost of project development per hour in Ukraine and carry out further calculations on this basis. At the moment (2020-2022), the average hourly development cost is $50. 

Note! All figures below are the average estimated value and cannot be considered the final price list. Think of this data as a way to get your first impression of a custom eCommerce website cost, and remember that we are ready to discuss your project in more detail.

The Price to Build Your eCommerce Website Per Stage - Cost Breakdown

It would be best to divide the whole process into doable modules to make an initial estimate of the time and money required to create an eCommerce website.

We will go over the main stages of eCommerce website development, including the average prices of each and essential tips that will help you save your budget and follow the LEAN combined with Agile/Scrum methodology from the very beginning to the end. 

What Is the Cost of Preliminary Research

Any development based on Lean methodology starts with research. It is essential to study the market, competitors, and target audience to determine the prospects of an idea, find out what practices competing companies use, and understand the target audience’s expectations regarding the product and web or mobile resource.

This research will also allow you to find opportunities to improve an existing idea and automatically make the future eCommerce website more promising. On average, pre-development research takes about 40 hours, and the average cost of labor for specialists is $30 per hour.

• Total - $1200 for market research if the customer did not do it independently.

What Is the Cost for Ecommerce Website Design?

Design is crucial for any project, both in e-commerce and beyond. Its attractiveness, user-centeredness, the right choice of colors, white space balance, and many other factors determine whether your bounce rate is high or low. Of course, it should be low.

To achieve this, you will need to create the following items. The time and cost for UI and UX design services estimates are attached. These are the final prices that include the design idea development, prototyping, sketching, reviewing, and editing until getting the perfect final result. 

Cost to Set up - the Necessary Features

Developing key features will bite off the lion's share of your budget. Below we provide a list of the most important functions; however, most likely, in the process of developing your project, you may want to add something extra to this list that will contribute to the positive experience of your online shoppers, as well as to the final price. 

Money-saving tip! Don’t forget about the LEAN methodology essentials! You may use the list above as the foundation for your MVP development. However, make sure to test every feature and your target audience’s response before actually investing in custom website development services! 

The Price for Ecommerce Website Hosting

Your online store also needs a name (or domain) and some space where it will be stored (hosting). Fortunately, connecting a domain and renting a hosting isn’t complicated or expensive. The only thing you need to do is to choose the domain and hosting provider. Choose the name of your website and pick up the hosting package that suits you most. 

Below is the comparison chart to facilitate your searches. 

Money-saving tip! As you can see, the domain names are quite affordable, while the hosting services’ prices are diverse. Compare them carefully to choose the package that suits you best. Dedicated hosting for large scale enterprises is the most expensive, while the cheaper offers are suitable for simple landing pages only. Pick up something that fits your budget but is still able to cover your business needs. 

What’s the Price of Testing and Bug Fixing of Your Future Solution? 

According to Statista, the process of testing and quality assurance takes up 20-35% of the final development budget. This is a significant figure, which is why many business owners try to save money at this stage, making a serious mistake. In fact, launching a bug-infested product will cost you much more than making sure all the features work correctly before release.

So, guided by our previous estimates, the cost to test your project and fix bugs will cost approximately $6200 ($11500 (per development) +$6250 (per design) *35%). 

Money-saving tip! As you know, there are manual and automated testing approaches, so you should wisely balance between them. For example, the repetitive scenarios can be tested automatically, while the scenarios that demand special attention (for example, regression testing and other high-risk cases) should be tested manually. 

Additionally, sometimes it would be wise to increase the number of auto-test scenarios. This will slightly increase the final price and time to finalize the product; however, this approach is recommended to at least test the payment features. 

The Cost to Maintain Your Own Ecommerce Project

The basic cost to maintain your eCommerce project per month is $2000 (per 40 working hours). However, this figure may be even higher for projects with high loads and complex architecture. Below are the ongoing costs that are included in the maintenance services price: 

• Data backup

• Security checks and improvements

• Content refreshing, meta content revision

• Website loading speed improvements

• SEO improvements and analytics

• Errors checking and fixing 

The Cost to Promote Your Website

It would be wrong to miss the cost of marketing and promotion of your eCommerce store. 

According to the E‐commerce marketing strategies research, “Companies are changing how they market their products in order to better satisfy consumers’ needs. Traditional marketing has become more expensive and less effective over time. Now companies can use the Internet to enter into a dialogue with their customers. Advertising, research, sales, promotions, coupon distribution, and customer support can all be done on the Internet.” 

This is the most challenging point for estimating since each business has a unique marketing strategy that fully meets its needs and its target audience’s specifics. However, let’s take a look at the main approaches you may use and their cost. 

• Paid advertising. At least $50-100 per month will be enough to invest in paid advertising. You may choose PPC or PPI, test both approaches, and determine which one best suits your business. 

• Email marketing. As for email marketing, you may invest as much as you feel comfortable to invest. However, consider fees for using email marketing services. For example, you may use Mailchimp for free or for $299, depending on the volume of your subscriber base. 

• Social media marketing. The cost of your social media marketing strategy also depends on the platforms you intend to use and your activity. $100-150 per month will be enough to be well promoted on Facebook and Instagram. 

• Content creation. Fortunately, an eCommerce store doesn’t need a lot of content creation. The main thing to invest in is your product descriptions. They should be clear, attractive, comprehensive, emotion-provoking, and motivating. The average price per 100-word description is $3, so be guided by the number of goods you need to describe. 

• SEO optimization. As for SEO optimization, this is a free strategy if you can do it yourself. For example, keyword research with Google Keywords Planner is free of charge. However, you may use more sophisticated tools (for example, Ahfres, $99-399 per month). If you need to hire an SEO specialist, their salary is approximately $500 in Ukraine per month. 

To summarize, the cost to promote your eCommerce project will be approximately $200-1000 per month. Also, keep in mind that you will need to invest even more in the first month of your project’s existence. 

How Much Does It Cost to Build an eCommerce Website in Total? 

Let’s find out the final approximate price to create an eCommerce website in 2020-2022. 

The Minimal Online Store Development Cost

So, the cost of creating an eCommerce site is impressive even with the most conservative estimates. Therefore, it is not surprising that some business owners, and especially aspiring startups, want to save money and are looking for the cheapest solutions on the market.

Yes, as opposed to custom development, you can use specialized platforms to create a simple eCommerce website yourself. Below we have made a price overview of the leading platforms of this type.

How to build an eCommerce website with the help of the above platforms? This process is easy, cheap, and intuitive but still has some limitations you should take into account.

• No opportunities for your design customization. When creating your eCommerce project on your own, you will have to choose from some templates that may not fit your mission, values, core idea, and target audience’s expectations. What’s more, they are already used by somebody else! 

• Poor SEO performance. Honestly, Google doesn’t love websites that are dragged and dropped with the help of online builders. It considers them to be not so reliable, so you will have to invest a lot in your SEO promotion to make your project visible in Google results.

• No scaling opportunities. Website builders may be suitable for simple landing pages that don’t expect significant traffic, but it will be difficult (and sometimes even impossible) to scale your project and improve it. 

Money-saving tip! Despite all the limitations of online eCommerce website builders, you may use them as almost free tools to gather feedback from your target audience, test their acceptance, and ask them to share impressions. With these insights in your pocket, you will be more confident when it comes to investments in custom website development. 

How Long Does It Take to Develop an Ecommerce Website

The time to develop your project is another fluctuating metric. On average, this process takes from 4 to 6 months, although it can take up to a year if you want to create a technically complex solution with many integrations that can disrupt the market. What’s more, some processes are ongoing, such as maintaining and improving your website and marketing promotion. So, the answer to the question of how much does an eCommerce website cost will also depend on the time spent on its creation. 

Custom Ecommerce Website Development Cost Depending on the Development Vendor

The location of the vendor and the size of the development company also matter. As for the size, the top-rated, popular, and well-established companies ask for higher payments just because of their branded name and the feeling of luxury when cooperating with them. As for the small and medium-sized companies, the quality of the result is not at risk, and there is more room for price negotiation.

As for the location, the economic standards of living are too diverse from country to country. This is the factor that affects the final price in the case of offshore outsourcing. Let’s compare the final cost of the eCommerce project development if you hire programmers from the USA, Ukraine, and India. 

Conclusion

eCommerce development is quite challenging and costly. However, don’t forget about the fact that right now is the perfect time to do it. The customers who are unwilling to visit shopping malls expect innovative online experiences with artificial intelligence, augmented reality, shoppable videos, and other interactive ideas you may realize on your website. What’s more, we know how to manage the development budget wisely to create everything you need, carefully test each hypothesis, and avoid overspending on each of the development steps!