E-Commerce has played a very important role during the health crisis. It can be said that they have been a lifeline for many entrepreneurs and small businesses who saw confinement and mobility restrictions threatening the survival of their businesses.
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Online purchases are maintained during de-refinement
The progressive return to normality has begun to show that the spectacular development that this sales channel has had has not been circumstantial. Despite the fact that the start of the de-escalation has stabilized the online sales figures, a report on the impact of the Coronavirus on e-Commerce reveals that electronic commerce is here to stay.
Specifically, the report indicates that online sales have almost tripled their figures since the beginning of the State of Alarm until mid-May, and that the lack of focus has barely reduced online business activity by 1%.
In parallel, other studies, such as the one prepared by Veepee on Online Shopping Trends , go further and suggest that 60% of the population will continue to buy through the internet when the quarantine ends.
How do I choose a type of e-Commerce and what is its price?
For these and many other reasons, it may already be time for you to take a step forward and decide to open your own e-commerce . There are several possibilities to undertake through an online store , and different types of e-Commerce ranging from marketplaces to aggregators , through community-based businesses.
However, in this post we want to make an approximation to the price of creating an online store, and show you some examples of e-Commerce and the options you have to start one. Before calculating the price of an online store you must take into account some details.
First of all, anyone can create a digital trade with the help of free platforms. However, and unless you are a person with experience in web development and design or you use a very basic platform, it is recommended that you entrust the creation of your e-Commerce to a specialized company.
Online trading platforms
In general, each of these platforms is indicated for objectives that have to do with the number of products in its catalog, its complexity, integration with the company’s ERP systems, etc. Some of the best known are: Prestashop , Woocommerce , Magento , Virtuemart , Shopify and Ionos 1 & 1 .
We are going to show you the characteristics of three of them that are indicated for a different company size: on the one hand, Magento admits infinite options and is specially designed to design large online stores; Woocommerce, for its part, is more suitable for SMEs, and the target audience for Ionos 1 & 1 is the small retail business.
Magento: the platform for large online stores
This platform is specially designed to design large online stores in a flexible, integrable and scalable way. To give you an idea, it has been the platform used to configure the digital stores of firms such as Nike, Ford, Olympus and Coca Cola.
It has a free and a paid solution: the first can be downloaded by any professional or web development agency to create an online store by implementing files and expanding functionalities according to their criteria. If you are an expert person, you can save the thousands of euros that the design and development of the store can cost, its integration with a company website, SEO, domain, maintenance, technical support and a host of extras.
The paid version, starting at $ 22,000, has some of these features and functionalities, and offers a specialized technical service that supports installation, use, and troubleshooting, although it does not include the page layout. Being a complex platform, in both cases it requires a powerful hosting service, which can be around € 60 or € 80 per year.
Woocommerce: the option for SMEs
The WordPress platform is one of the most used for the design of medium-sized online stores. Woocommerce is a plugin designed for WordPress whose simplest version only includes the basic elements of e-commerce. These additional functions called Pluggins can be free or paid in case you need advanced functionalities.
The platform offers three different hosting rates ranging from € 9.95 per month to € 29.95. From here you can add a lot of features, from graphic themes for $ 100 per year to payment platforms like PayPal for $ 30 per month, and security certificates for up to $ 65 per year. The design is also your responsibility.
Ionos 1 & 1: the platform for small retail
It is the easiest to use because it includes a simple editor with which you can create and edit your own website. For this, it uses pre-existing templates that allow you to customize some of its elements, and therefore creativity is very limited and can give the feeling that it is made in series. It is an inexpensive solution that offers different hosting solutions ranging from € 2.99 to € 14.99 per month, but also offers notable service limitations.
Custom development: creating an online business from scratch
As you can see, despite the fact that development platforms are nominally free and accessible, it is often difficult to enable your own online commerce if you lack certain knowledge in web design and development. If this is your case, you also have the possibility of commissioning the creation of an online store from scratch to specialized companies, which offer different prices depending on the business needs. By using these types of platforms, companies can offer much more competitive prices. These prices range from very basic proposals with hardly any accessories, from 700 euros, to the development of large complex online stores that can reach astronomical prices.
As a medium, you can find proposals to develop an electronic commerce from WordPress that includes the reservation of the domain, web space and email, the basic customization of the template, the upload of several products, the configuration of a payment gateway and the operating and content upload guide, for around 1,500-1,800 euros, to which would have to be added around 300 euros more for the design of the store, the color range and other graphic elements.
Whether you want to set up your own online store or if you prefer to turn to professionals, this is a good time for you to join a commercial modality that in 2018 touched 40,000 million euros and that each year offers record figures.
