How Much Does It Cost to Create an Ecommerce Website?

What’s the average price of developing an ecommerce website? There are multiple factors affecting the final cost like features, design, integrations. However, it’s only the case for websites built from scratch without using any out-of-the-box solutions.

Let’s figure out how to estimate a website cost and what MVP features should be used to build a lead generation ecommerce website from scratch.

Average Cost of Ecommerce Website

On average, a custom ecommerce website costs may range from $26,400 to $42,350. That’s true for creating a website from scratch.

Why is it better to provide a custom development solution? Custom sites are high speed, user-friendly, and thus good for SEO. They have a unique UI design, so your competitors won’t use the same template.

Moreover, custom websites are more secure than open-source solutions when you deal with the user’s personal information and payment details.

Now, let’s break down the ecommerce website development cost:

• Simple websites. It takes approximately 403 hours to develop a simple website with basic MVP features. With an average price of $50 per hour in Eastern Europe, it’ll cost $20,150.
• Complex websites with additional features. It takes 576 hours on average for a team to make a complex website, with the rate of $50 per hour, it’ll start from $28,800.

Ecommerce websites should be well-structured to work fast and rank well on Google and have a unique design. These factors raise the final price of ecommerce website development. Besides, the tech stack also affects the price. For instance, you don’t need push notifications or coupons for a simple project, but you can’t develop a large-sized ecommerce platform without those features.

What Affects Ecommerce Website Cost

There are four major cost-drivers:

• The complexity of ecommerce site features
• Complex UI design
• Using third party integrations
• Developers’ rates and their location

Let’s consider each of them in detail.

Number of Features

As your tech requirements grow, so does the cost to build an ecommerce website.

Screens, buttons, fields, logic determined the costs of website development.

Also, developers often use 3rd party APIs (integrate payment systems or social login) or development from scratch.

For instance, to build a payment gateway for an ecommerce platform, developers need, on average, 39 hours, and the cost starts from $1,950. On the other hand, developing a registration form takes 11 hours and costs $550.

Unique Website Design

If you want to have a sophisticated ecommerce website design, then you need extra money.

Design isn’t about a bright picture, it provides a simple and fast checkout process and clear interface for clients. Sometimes, even make customers buy more products.

Moreover, if you’re planning to have animations or present 3-4 visual concepts (designers need time to develop them), be ready for additional expenses.

To create a custom web UI/UX design, designers need, on average, 65 hours. If we take $50 per hour, the final website design cost will be $3,250.

Besides, you may want to adapt your platform to mobile devices, then that’s another cost. By the way, it’s an excellent idea: 80% of the customers will prefer mobile apps to purchase online in 2021.

That’s why it’s better to include adaptive web design costs in the list of ecommerce website design costs. Thus, your web pages will be responsive on different devices, and you won’t need to create native iOS and Android applications for mobile users.

The average adaptive ecommerce web design price will be $1,900 per 38 hours.

Costs of 3rd Party Integrations

The cost of ecommerce website development will be higher, in case you want to use third-party tools to manage payments, AI-powered chatbots, or tailor shipping options,

Let’s compare two major payment integrations – Stripe and PayPal.

Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ per successful transaction. PayPal takes the same price plus 5% for payments under $10.

Besides, it takes some time to integrate a payment system into the platform. The price for 10-12 hours will be $500-$600.

Want a robot to notify your clients when orders ship or confirm their reservations by SMS or call?

The solution is simple — Twilio. It’s the cloud communication platform that more than 50,000 companies and over 2 million developers use as their platform for customer engagement. Using communication APIs, you can text, place a call or start a chat from your website with a few code lines.

Let’s take a look at Twilio beginning prices:

• $0.0042 per message for all WhatsApp messaging
• $0.0075 to send or receive a text
• $0.0085/min for receiving phone calls, and $0.013/min to make a call

Software developers need 4-6 hours to integrate it. The average price will be $250.

Another example, emails. You’ll definitely need them to inform your clients about their orders.

One of the best email services is Amazon Simple Email Service. The first 62,000 emails are for free, then you pay $0.10 for every 1,000 letters. Amazon SES integration will cost between $175 and $225 for 4 hours.

Developers and Their Location

The average cost of software development in Eastern Europe is lower than in the USA, Canada, and Western Europe.

Here are the costs per hour to create an ecommerce website in different countries:

• Canada – $100 – $149
• USA – $100 – $149
• Germany – $50 – $199
• Switzerland – $50 – $99
• Latin America – $30 – $50
• Ukraine – $125 – $50

Unfortunately, a big price doesn’t mean that you get high-quality service, and it doesn’t matter where to hire talents – from the USA, Germany or Ukraine.

There are some additional expenses when building an ecommerce website:

• Domain name ($0,95 to $12/annually)
• Hosting ($75 to $10 000/annually)
• SSL certificate ($6 to $200)
• Maintenance ($500 to $12,000)

And finally, what’s the use of the product no one heard about? Don’t forget to include marketing expenses in the business plan:

• Pay-per-click advertising (the cost depends on keywords competition)
• Search engine optimization – $1,000 to $2,000 monthly on average
• Copywriting – from $50 per article
• Social media marketing from – $400 per month

Ecommerce Website Features Cost

Content, design, and domain surely affect the ecommerce website cost. But, it’s the features that cost the most.

Let’s see how much it approximately costs to create MVP features:

• Sign up for email plus password – $550
• Singing in by email, password, forgot password, log out – $1,350
• Watched products, purchased products, popular products, add an item to the cart, site search – $4,450
• Shopping categories – $1,150
• Photo slider, review, product’s rate – $2,050
• List of products, buy an item, delete from the cart – $2,900
• List of cards, add card info – $3,800
• Clients profile, orders, payments screen, delete card – $2,600
• Terms and conditions, About us, feedback form – $1,300

If you want to have a sophisticated website, let’s see how much it cost to develop an ecommerce website with complex features:

• Wish list for clients – $600
• Setting up Google Analytics – $600
• Login over Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Instagram – $900
• Saved for later list – $100
• Blog management – $3,250
• Push notifications in client’s account – $700
• Promo codes in admin panel – $1500
• Renew order from client’s account – $400

Moreover, if you want to get more traffic to your website, it may be a great idea to integrate Google Adwords. Thus, you can immediately get results by jumping into the top spots of Google. It’ll cost $600 per 12 hours ($600) to add it.

Let’s sum up the results. To develop a simple ecommerce website, developers need 403 hours. With the average rate of $50, it’ll cost $20,150.

If you want to have a more sophisticated website with extra features, then the price will start from $28,800. General features start at $20,150 for general features + $8,050 for additional  features and $600 for monetization without web design costs.

This is how much you have to pay to build an ecommerce website in Eastern European countries. But how much does it cost to build an ecommerce website with MVP features in other countries?

• Central and Western Europe – $40,300 at $100/h
• USA – $60,450 at $150/h
• Australia – $40,300 at $100/h

Technology Stack of an Ecommerce Website

Consider a list of technologies that you need to satisfy retailers’ current needs and customers’ expectations.

Front end: 

• Angular plus Angular Universal. Angular Universal is a server-side rendering tool that will help you to get your website rendered faster
• UI components libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, Angular Material, or Semantic UI

Back end:

• Nodejs plus TypeScript
• PostgreSQL or Mysql as the major database with Sequelize as ORM
• Elasticsearch to provide a full-text search engine
• Redis for caching
• BullMQ as a message broker

Integrations:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service for file storing
• Amazon SES
• Paypal, Stripe, Adyen, etc. for payments service
• Firebase Cloud Messaging to get notifications
• Login over social media API (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail)

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, you got the full answer to the question “how much does it cost to develop an ecommerce website”. As you can see, you need to consider a lot of factors before creating your ecommerce platform.

If you want to build a simple ecommerce website, you can use ready-made templates like Magento or Shopify. In case you want to take your business to the next level and serve as many clients as possible, then a custom ecommerce website will be the right decision.

Author’s bio

Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a mobile and web development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.