How much should a professional e-commerce website cost?

[William Baker]

I am looking for the cost of a website with around 1500 pages. Professionally programmed with many features such as: shopping carts, search engine, stock availability, add to wish list, One page checkout, accounts, categories and 1000s of products, search engine friendly and much more features. This website/platform should be high end and customised. I am very unsure about how much it should cost and some companies are offering £5000 for the website and help manage it and others are offering £40,000 with full management and help in the whole business aswell. Obviously the cheaper one will have less then half the features I have listed but I am not sure if it is worth paying for the £40,000 platform. They have also offered a mobile app for £15,000.

 

[ryedale]

The app is pointless - so long as your site works well responsively, then people will buy through that rather than installing an app.

Your marketing budget is just as important as the site design as getting any new E-Commerce venture off the ground from scratch is extremely challenging.

What are you planning on having on 1500 pages! or is that product pages?

 

[William Baker]

Yes I agree app is not needed at the moment. And yes the 1500 pages are product pages. What are your thoughts on the pricing?

 

[fisicx]

And whatever you pay for the site, the marketing costs will be a lot more.

£5000 is at the lower end of the price range. £40,000 might be about right - there just isn't enough detail in your post to give better advice. What do you mean by high end? What are the products? Who are the target customers?

 

[ryedale]

It all depends on so many different factors

The platform used to build the site
The type of sector you are targeting - potential customers?
Bespoke coding - the full functionality required?
Hosting set up required?

If you want to pm me a full spec (or post it here) , I'll be happy to have a closer look for you.

 

[William Baker]

Medical supplies including individuals to multinational organisations and also big players like the NHS. High end meaning a high quality and professional website which can manage high traffic and also very responsive, multi linguistic and multi national.

 

[fisicx]

In which case £40K probably isn't enough.

 

[William Baker]

So what is the realistic price and how much shall we spend on marketing per month?

 

[William Baker]

Also does making a £40k website improve traffic. We know about Google Ads but other than that does it increase traffic?

 

[fisicx]

No, all that 40K does is get you a website with all the features you want. You then need to spend a whole lot more on marketing (including SEO) to get the traffic.

Getting on to page one for all 1500 products could easily eat up 500K

 

[William Baker]

How much should we sped on Google Ads?

 

[William Baker]

*spend

 

[fisicx]

For promoting 1500 products to NHS and other medical organisations world wide I'd budget a minimum of £1000/day.

You are moving into a multi-million pounds business area, your competitors will have huge marketing budgets.

 

[William Baker]

Thanks for your help!

 

[Mr D]

Medical supplies including individuals to multinational organisations and also big players like the NHS. High end meaning a high quality and professional website which can manage high traffic and also very responsive, multi linguistic and multi national.

Not meaning to be funny, but would a site able to handle high traffic be redundant if you are targeting at multinationals and such as the NHS? Presumably they will not have more than a few staff looking at any one site?

 

[Paul Norman]

The brief is insufficient to give an accurate answer, but £40k does not sound excessive.

You will, in addition, receive a lot of 'bits and pieces of advice', which rather confuses the thread.

You need to make a precise specification, and get businesses with experience of e commerce to provide you with detailed responses to that.

For this kind of budget, I would expect the pitch to be face to face, and I would expect refers. I would ensure the contract is water tight.

If you have no experience of this kind of purchase, I would involve someone who has. Such a person would help you to understand the spec, and probably save you money.

 

[The Byre]

Medical supplies including individuals to multinational organisations and also big players like the NHS. High end meaning a high quality and professional website which can manage high traffic and also very responsive, multi linguistic and multi national.

In which case £40k is probably just enough for a Band-Aid sticking plaster of a website.

You will need a database behind the website that reports stock levels and fires off orders to resupply, as well as all the payment tools required. All that means that a site of the scope you envisage cannot be done, without a proper total enterprise integration and a dedicated team to run it all.

A simple and silly 'back-of-envelope' calculation - On one project I did just for fun (c.a. 100 pages, each page containing the equivalent of c.a. 10 pages in a book) just text and pictures took me about five hours per page - that's without any stock level databases or on-line payments, just text and pictures. So just text and pictures for 1,500 pages in one language would take 7,500 - and repeat for each language! How many languages do you need - there are 18 languages in the EU?

If you just do the top ten, that's 75,000 hours work at (for the sake of argument) £10 an hour (good luck getting programmers at that rate!) comes to £750k.

Given that there might be some savings as you will be repeating pages, but also remembering that you will have to pay someone to write all those texts and then there are all those translation and checking of text costs, plus the cost of on-line sales and CC transactions, I think that your annual costs for the website alone (without any SEO or PPC activity) should not leave much change out of £1m.

 

[Alan]

Is this an existing business or a startup?

 

[mtools]

A simple and silly 'back-of-envelope' calculation - On one project I did just for fun (c.a. 100 pages, each page containing the equivalent of c.a. 10 pages in a book) just text and pictures took me about five hours per page - that's without any stock level databases or on-line payments, just text and pictures. So just text and pictures for 1,500 pages in one language would take 7,500 - and repeat for each language! How many languages do you need - there are 18 languages in the EU?

5 hours to do a page? what?! if they're product pages i would imagine you could do 10 pages in an hour provided there was a page template in the theme / site documentation.

 

[The Byre]

you could do 10 pages in an hour provided there was a page template in the theme / site documentation.

Simple page assembly, yes, but with photography, text writing, translations, site checking and signing off?

 

[mtools]

Simple page assembly, yes, but with photography, text writing, translations, site checking and signing off?

Yes, if someone told me they were going to take almost a whole day to make one product page I'd tell them to get shot. You'd have a bank of photographs already as I imagine you wouldn't be asking your web guy to double up as a photographer (not if you're spending £40k that's for sure), translation / proof reading of translations and sign off I would also imagine these would be done in a batch, rather than one at a time.

 

[ddmcmullan]

No way you can answer that without more info but here's my experience.

I've had websites built on Magento that pretty much cover everything you've put there with numerous extensions required. I think with all the extensions put on, a good design etc you would be looking from a middle of market supplier about £10k. On top of this cost of all the extensions, (about £2k).

The actual main work in this sort of thing is not the infrastructure of the website it's uploading all the products, images, descriptions, testing and all the admin tasks that go with it. If you want the company to do all of that which is really an admin task add about another £12k however it is cheaper to do this yourself. As a general rule I think however long it takes the developers to build the website requires about 2 to 3 times more time for the admin side.

Multi lingual stuff etc, no experience in this but if you just want the infrastructure to be able to do this I can't imagine it would be expensive on Magento, there is probably a plugin for it. Let's say top end plus installation £1k.

If you want the content generating this isn't really something you would want an agency to do as it would cost a fortune due to sheer amount of time involved at a high rate.

If you want all this stuff done bespoke not using open source software, I have no idea. £50k plus, wouldn't recommend this though as it's like reinventing the wheel.

 

[BusinessTradeCentre]

If the 1,500 pages are set up correctly with on page optimization then you could potentially rank for those products quite easily depending on the competition. 1 visit per day on each page, let you do the maths.

 

[fisicx]

Nope, not going to happen. There are big medical supply companies spending huge amounts on marketing (which includes SEO), the OP isn't even going get into page one without a big investment. And even then, the NHS isn't going to switch to a new supplier. Buyers don't search google for bandages, they buy in bulk from wholesalers.

 

[antropy]

You will find that there are a few variables affecting the price of a professional ecommerce website and it would be quite an interesting exercise to come up with a Machine Learning algorithm to train with data of historical prices from a large number of companies.

I suspect that the main variables would be: size of the agency, complexity of the website and amount of design and branding work requried on the website.

It might be possible to come up with a cost function like the below where Complexity and Design are on a scale of 1-3 with 3 being more work needed:
Cost = £500 x Agency Size x Complexity of Programming x Amount of Design Work

So for a single freelancer working on the most simple site it would be:
£500 x 1 x 1 x 1 = £500

For a mid sized agency working on a site of medium complexity and design it would be:
£500 x 4 x 2 x 2 = £8000

Of course there would need to be some adjustments, but I believe those are the main variables affecting price.

 

[Deleted member 287446]

Give me a call or inmail and I can ffer you a bespoke website and ecommerce solution for less than 40K....

 

[SuperLiam]

Your question shouldn't be how much should it cost but rather how much are you willing to pay to get exactly what you want?

Why?

There are so many developers in such a saturated market that you can find a developer who will do this for £500 and one who will quote £10,000... Price isn't reflective of skill though and don't feel like the more you pay the better the work because it's not the case.

You want to look for several different factors...

- Previous work: Don't just look at the websites they've built but ask for references or contact the website owners directly as it's not uncommon for some developers to use other peoples work as their own to secure a deal.

- Double check their name/company on Google, spend some time researching to find everything you can about them.

- make sure you talk to them on the phone or via Skype before you agree to anything, you MUST be able to communicate with your developer clearly, this is one of the most important factors because when it comes to making important decisions you don't want to be going around in circles trying to get your point across.

Personally, I don't think you should be paying anywhere near £40,000 as I'm just finishing up a website right now that's almost exactly the same as what you want and I did it for £10,000 with all the features you're looking for... I'd be happy to show you it if you want to know what you could expect for £10k and also get some ideas moving forward but I'm still working on it and so it's not entirely finished but I think you might benefit from seeing what you can get for your money.

I hope this helps you make a more informed decision.

 

[Alan]

You guys never heard of value based pricing? If a website is worth £40k to the customer, that is what you should charge. Offering it it at £10k is just a way of going out of business. That the trouble with the web design business, its full of non business people.

 

[fisicx]

If you read the whole thread you will realised the whole thing is a pipe dream. The op wants to sell medical products internationally and to the NHS. You don't do this through an ecommerce site no matter how much you paid for it.

 

[Website Design Ltd]

A lot of thought needs to go into the level the business is at currently and the budget you have.

If you have a £40k budget spending £40k on a website would be entirely pointless and you are just throwing your money away. On a £40k budget, you should not be looking to spend more than a quarter of that on the website, with three-quarters going on marketing because a website without money spent on bringing in visitors is no different to buying a work of art and hanging it on your wall in your office and hoping it gets you some sales.

 

[fisicx]

In this case the cost is irrelevant.

The business model won't work so building an ecommerce site is pointless. The NHS doesn't buy medical supplies from online stores.

 

[SuperLiam]

@fisicx is right, when was the last time you saw your GP on an e-commerce store ordering your paracetamol?

Seriously though, NHS won't buy from online stores.

 

[threenine]

To answer the OP, there is both Good New, Bad News and reality.

The good news is that you can develop a website really cheaply, hell there is probably some woman called Melissa in the Phillipines that will knock you up a WordPress Site with a template for WooCommerce & some custom plugins and even load your initial product list for under £1000.

The Bad News is Melissa is knocking out 5-10 of those websites a month and she hasn't got time for you because she's too busy with the next fool who has a pipe dream of building the next Amazon on a People Per Hour budget!

The Harsh reality is , that building a successful website and a successful business that goes with it takes money. People need to shake off the 90's illusion that all you need for a successful business is a website, and that websites are a just a build once and run for a lifetime of making millions affair.

The harsh reality, is that a website is a bottomless pit of money. It takes a lot more than just some tweaking of CSS and HTML to build a website.

The truth is, what most people consider to be a website or even a mobile app, is actually a culmination of several hundred services and different skill sets.

We've worked on large e-commerce projects whereby £40 000 just about covered the coffee and meeting room sandwiches budget.

That being said we've also worked on projects whereby the entire business and website was created on a turnkey budget of less than £40 000.

There is no definite budget for building a website, just the same as there is no exact and definite budget for building a house. Most houses are wildly different to one another, there is an estimated cost of around £2,500 per square meter, but as with websites, building a house takes several hundred different trades to come in and do their share. So prices can and do fluctuate.

To get some kind of idea of how much you need to spend on your website you need to go all the way back to your business plan. Look at your Projected sales figures and do the break down from there.

Here's an example of how the maths work

If you have a forecasted profit of lets say £250 000.

Ideally speaking your website sales will need to be in the region of £1 000 000
Simplistically based on the average profit markup 25 - 33% per item sold

Lets say that the average price of item on the website is £55

This means that your website needs to generate approximately 18 200 sales a year. Divide that by 12 months in a year. that 1500 sales a month.

So what do we need to do to get 1 500 Sales a month ?

Lets break that down. So average statistics on the web buyer behaviour is that only 1 in 12 Visitors to websites results in sales. If your take into account that the same user might visit your website between 5 - 25 times before actually making a purchase. This roughly translates to you requiring to generate between 25 000 - 35 000 visitors a month

We now have to build into this Customer Service, Returns , Support , Stock, CRM, ERP , Hosting and a whole raft of other services required just to basically keep the lights for your website.

You see, a budget for your website needs to be driven by the reality of what you want to achieve and only your Business and Marketing Plan will detail that.

The truth is, you cannot set a defined budget for your website. It is an ongoing expense that your business will need to continue investing in.

Most successful e-commerce business have teams of people dedicated to servicing the website. Including Developers, SEO, Analysts, QA, Marketers etc.

Take a small team of around 6 people, on average their salaries might be around £25-45K,
6 X £45K = £270 000 , on basic salaries. We have yet to factor in Tax, Pensions, NIC and the raft of expenses it takes just have staff.

The truth, is it comes down to your Business and Marketing Plans!

 

[AllUpHere]

The price for a website is usually exactly the same as it is for a second hand car. Most are somewhere between 20 quid and a couple of hundred thousand.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

40k doesn't seem to be to crazy but did they mention what website e-commerce engine is running the show. High end is relative and 40k spend can still look shit, working out a site from hosting to landing page optimization testing via heat map etc... can cost a lot of hours the product itself is built quite easy.

 

[caterinafabian]

Expect to pay between $300 and $1,000 for template customization. The cost varies depending on how much work you want to be done such as adding a header image, moving the logo location, creating a fixed navigation bar, changing the overall layout design, etc.

 

[fisicx]

Expect to pay between $300 and $1,000 for template customization.

Tweaking a template is pointless, this enterprise would need a full bespoke system, built from the ground up.

 

[threenine]

Expect to pay between $300 and $1,000 for template customization. The cost varies depending on how much work you want to be done such as adding a header image, moving the logo location, creating a fixed navigation bar, changing the overall layout design, etc.

Considering you will pay on average $80 for a theme , it totally validates @fisicx point

Also bear in mind that most Web Designers don't have a clue about what it takes to design and develop complete and effective digital marketing strategies.

you'll soon see where your money needs to be spent.

 

[NirvanaTech]

That's some impressive commentary, and completely arbitrary. Can you take business away from other companies in saturated markets, sure, if you have the right technology, Amazon did. Can a website self-market, sure if you've to a high LTVtoCAC like Amazon (15to1) compared to everyone else (3to1 to 5to1) and use the right tech. Can you do that with Shopify, no, can you do it with Magento out of the box, no, can you do it with Hybris, not at a realistic cost, can you find developers who know how to compete in that market and understand pure efficiency outside of enterprise companies, no.

Ok, we know them and yes it'll cost £10,000s but here's the simple point, to beat a saturated market you need to be more efficient than your best competitors, and to be more efficient you need more efficient implementations, not taking months but ideally weeks, it makes your entire business model agile and lean. Amazon did it by building their our technology but that is a sunk cost over a multi-year period, we know people who did it by stripping out all the rubbish in existing technology again as a multi-year sunk cost, most will just build on existing technology making it more inefficient as there is no material short term sunk cost, that cost is spread over the business lifetime which is what makes the business inefficient, which leads to complete failure in core markets.

Unless you have £millions in seed capital only the first two will work, the last one will just be a slow, or perhaps fast, road to paying providers to build something which has no hope of making you sustainable and business adapting revenue. With 1,500 products it's too small, if you want traction you want 10,000s products, only a small fraction will make the profit but the rest are there for 'show' for Google and potential customers benefit. Look big, act big, work lean, work efficient, and people will think you are the go to place. The smart entrepreneurs these days start with a Lean Startup methodology and incrementally build on each success, unfortunately you're not going to find many providers liking that approach.

 

[NirvanaTech]

UPDATE: No one in forums is going to have a clue what the above means, it is proven in psychology the loudest gain the most traction, the accuracy becomes less relevant (but in our view you want both), so providers will shout the loudest to create bespoke functionality which does nothing to create more public noise for the retailer. For that and 1,500 products you need to hire large numbers of Zery writers and flood the market with content, you'll be a media company with an ecommerce store, technology becomes immaterial. The Amazon way is to keep everything lean and efficient internally with advanced tech flooding the public markets with product noise, thereby drowning out the competitors. All very simple.