How Much Does It Cost to Work With an Ecommerce Website Designer?
When you run a business, you will no doubt have thought long and hard about the merits of having an eCommerce website built. After all, with more people than ever heading online to buy products, you want to ensure that they have access to your products. Of course, despite there being clear merits to having an eCommerce website, you still have to factor the actual building of your site into your budget somehow. This is why I want to talk to you about the costs of hiring an eCommerce website designer.
How much does it cost to work with an eCommerce website designer? The minimum price for an eCommerce website designer is £2,500. The price can go up from here, depending on the features a person wants their eCommerce site to have in place. The more elaborate the design and the more products on offer, the higher the cost of working with an eCommerce website designer would be. Opting for anything cheaper than £2,500 may result in a website lacking in functionality, particularly when it comes to responsive web design, i.e. being functional on mobile devices. It may also struggle on the user design front, particularly when it comes to encouraging people to purchase on the site.
Here, I want to talk about some of the costs of working with an eCommerce website designer and some of the expenses you will need to think about when it comes to your website’s continued maintenance. I do not want to leave a stone unturned when it comes to telling you just how much you could be looking to pay if you want an eCommerce site up and running.
What is an ecommerce website?
An eCommerce site allows companies to sell their products online. It really is as simple as that. People can browse for the products that they want and make their purchase through the website. It is, essentially, a new branch of a company, just without all of the costs of running a physical branch.
The benefit of having an ecommerce website
The major benefit of having an eCommerce website is to allow people to buy your products from the comfort of your own home. It is no secret that the number of people buying online is on the rise. The recent pandemic has started to open people’s eyes to the benefits of buying online too. If your products aren’t sold online, you will be missing out on a good chunk of your potential clients.
An eCommerce website will also allow you to target customers a bit further afield than your local area. This means more sales for your business.
Honestly, once you realise just how much extra business having an eCommerce website can bring, the cost of adding eCommerce to your website will seem cheap. Don’t think of it as an expense. Think of it as an investment in your business.
How much does it cost to work with an ecommerce website designer?
So, now the big question about how much it will cost to work with an eCommerce website designer. In this section, I want to talk about the average costs for an eCommerce web designer and some of the extra services that you can enjoy when you work with an experienced designer.
The cost of working with an ecommerce website designer
The cost of working with an eCommerce website designer can vary wildly. Prices can start as low as a few hundred pounds and can go all the way up to tens of thousands of pounds. This is an industry where you really get what you pay for too. For a small business that is looking to really make its mark online, the cost of a decent website will start at £2,500.
The cost will be dependent on the needs of the business. For example, a business that wants a unique design to their business will likely spend a lot more than a company that is willing to go with a generic website that likely shares a design with countless other websites online.
Bespoke or pre-made design?
Here at Sanders Design, I only offer bespoke designs. However, I know that there are several premade designs that cost as little as £200-£500.
In my opinion, a premade design is never going to be a good choice for an eCommerce website. They are affordable, yes. However, they have not been built with a particular business in mind. They are built for the mass market, and as a result, they may be sorely lacking in features that a particular business needs. They may also have features that a company doesn’t need but may be tough to remove.
With a bespoke design, absolutely everything about it has is created with your business in mind. This means the features that will really enhance your products and provide the best user experience. The design is also about reinforcing your brand and ensuring that you are seen as different from other websites online.
Bespoke web design takes time. Companies will often spend countless hours researching similar businesses in the niche to their client. They will also spend a decent chunk of time interviewing their client to find what they want from their website. After this, dozens and dozens of hours will be spent on the actual creation of the website. When you realise the amount of work that goes into creating a bespoke design, you will see that £2,500 is very affordable for the service.
Included features
Every business has its own requirements when it comes to the features on its website. Some businesses, for instance, will need a shopping cart system. Some may need to accept a certain method of payment. Some may even want to have their accounting and CRM systems integrated into their site, just to make everything easier when it comes to the management of their business.
The cost of an eCommerce web designer will include the cost of adding these features that your business requires. It is one of the true joys of working with a company that specialises in bespoke web design. They will always be able to ensure that your products are being sold in the right way. This isn’t something that you can get with off-the-shelf websites. While you may be able to add the features yourself, later on, it can be quite difficult.
The cost of adding these features will be included in the initial cost of your website. However, some companies may charge a little bit more if you are looking for incredibly difficult-to-implement features. This is why you should see £2,500 as more of a starting point than a firm price. Although a lot can be included at that ‘starting point’.
Responsive design
Websites need to be viewable on mobile devices nowadays. If they aren’t, then you will be cutting out at least 50% of your potential buyers. This is why you need responsive design, and only an eCommerce website designer that works on bespoke designs can deliver this.
Included in the cost of your website design will be a website that looks just as good on mobile devices as it does on desktop computers. This ensures that everybody gets the right experience when browsing your website, which will result in higher fees.
If you opt for an off-the-shelf design, then it may never be able to work properly on mobile devices. In some cases, it may cost several hundred pounds to ‘convert’ the design.
Bespoke branding
A lot of web designers will include branding in the cost of your project. This may include ensuring that the website contains your business’s colours and the style you want your brand to showcase. For an extra fee, some web designers will also be able to design logos and other graphics that can really enhance your branding.
A site that can grow with your business
When you buy a quality website, it will be a site that can expand as your business grows. For example, all of my projects use WooCommerce and WordPress as the backend. Both of these are infinitely expandable systems. You can add new products and content to your site with no more than a couple of clicks. New features can be rolled into the site as it expands too.
When you buy a quality web design, you are essentially paying for one design that is ever expandable. You do not get this with the off-the-shelf systems, many of which have locked coding or editing. You are pretty much stuck with whatever you paid for at the start.
On-page Search Engine Optimisation
Again, the benefit of bespoke design. Rolled into the cost will be on-page SEO, i.e. the starting point for helping your website get found online. It is one of the main reasons why you want to opt for bespoke web design, to be honest. Most pre-made templates are not SEO-optimised, and it can often cost several hundred pounds to convert them over.
The costs of running an ecommerce website
While the initial cost of working with an eCommerce website designer is likely to be your most significant expense in the short term, you do have to remember that going forward, there will be a few extra costs for running your eCommerce website. I want to give a brief overview of them here.
Do bear in mind that some of these are services that you require as soon as you start working with your eCommerce website designer. If you talk to me here at Sanders Design when you book a service, I will be more than happy to run you through the costs that you need to pay right away.
Domain name
Your domain name will be how people get to your website. For example, the domain name for my website is www.sandersdesign.com. Tap that into your address browser, and you will always end up on my website. If you are running a website, then you need a domain name too.
The cost of this will be dependent on the domain extension that you have (.co.uk, .com, etc.). However, the cost is never going to be that high.
Hosting
Hosting is essentially the place where you will be ‘storing’ your website online so that it is accessible to your visitors. The cost of this can vary. Hosting can be as little as £15 per month (for a passable web host), but as your site grows bigger, you could be looking at spending much more than this. At the start, budget between £13 and £20 per month, though.
If you work with Sanders Design, you can scratch the hosting off of your budget. My website design packages include hosting.
Website maintenance
A decent eCommerce website designer will likely offer a service for ongoing maintenance of your website. This will help ensure that your website remains secure and that all of the site’s plugins are kept ‘up to date’. This is important for offering the best user experience for your site visitors.
Expect a service like this to cost between £50 and £100 per month, depending on your website’s size.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of ensuring that your website is found in the search engines. After all, if your website can’t be found, it doesn’t matter how good a job your chosen eCommerce website designer performed on your website. It simply won’t make any money.
An eCommerce website designer will do a small amount of SEO work when they build your website. However, that is not everything that needs to be done. SEO is a neverending process. You should budget at least £500 per month for this, but the cost can be a lot higher, depending on the number of products your website offers as well as the keywords you wish to target.
Contact Sanders Design
If you are looking for an experienced eCommerce website designer, get in touch with me here at Sanders Design. I have plenty of successful projects under my belt, and with prices starting at £2,500, I feel that you will be pleased with the services that we can provide.
