How Much Does It Cost to Create an E-Commerce Site?

When you decide to create an e-commerce website, you need to choose the platform that will support your site. There are many alternatives for creating an e-commerce site. We can already divide them into two categories: Open Source and SaaS. Then you need to choose between creating your site entirely by hand yourself, calling on a web agency, or other providers. Let us get started!

SaaS Solutions

SaaS solutions allow you to create an e-commerce site just like Open Source solutions, but with several subtleties. First of all, you will need to pay a fairly high price every month, which will likely increase over time depending on your needs. Moreover, you will have no choice regarding your hosting solution and your site does not belong to you. Here are the prices of the recommended SaaS e-commerce platforms:

For the choice of your e-commerce site I strongly invite you to consult our article that lists the advantages and disadvantages of each. Wix will not be included, however, as this solution is too limited.

Open Source Solutions

Open source solutions allow you to have full control over what you want with a back office in the same way as SaaS tools. You can modify absolutely anything and you are free to modify the code of your tool. Moreover, your site belongs to you and the solution is free. You will need to find your own hosting and domain name via external services. Here are the best-known Open Source e-commerce platforms:

Hosting and Domain Name

Unlike SaaS solutions, e-commerce websites must have their own hosting and domain name through external solutions.
As for the domain name, whether for a .fr or .com, the domain name will never exceed €12/year — it is also possible that depending on the choice of your hosting, your domain name is offered for the 1st year.

As for hosting, an e-commerce site is far more resource-hungry than a showcase site, so the price will generally start from at least €100/year and can easily reach €1,000/year. If you are wondering which is better between SaaS tools and external hosting, know that on average external hosting will be more powerful.

Open Source — Is It Really Free?

Open Source is entirely free and entirely open to modification by the community and yourself on your own site. However, it is common to need additional plugins to enhance your e-commerce site. On average, the price of plugins can range from €0/year to over €1,000/year depending on your needs. It should be noted that solutions like Magento and PrestaShop will be far more comprehensive in features than SaaS solutions. This explains the price that plugins can reach.

To summarise the price of Open Source

The price of Open Source solutions, counting hosting, domain name, and plugins, averages from €13/month for a standard online shop to over €100/month for an advanced e-commerce site.

The Cost of Creating an E-Commerce Site

Now that you know the prices of the solutions that will support your online shop, let us look at what the creation could cost you. You can obviously take care of it yourself. In that case, WordPress or SaaS tools will be your best friends. However, it is very strongly recommended to call on a professional for creating your site.

Or discover the price of a showcase website, portal, and other types.

Call on a Freelancer or a Web Agency

The price of creating an online sales site depends mainly on 4 criteria:

• The number of products
• E-commerce features (functionalities)
• Design
• Natural SEO

As a general rule, the price of a freelancer will be lower than an agency, although if you choose several freelancers to take care of each part, the price will likely be similar to that of a web agency.

Whether with SaaS tools or Open Source tools, on average a small e-commerce site will cost you €2,000 for a freelancer and €3,000 for an agency, excluding the SEO part and without in-depth design.

A design featuring animations and interactivity (or even 3D) can increase the cost of creating an e-commerce site to over €50,000.
As for SEO, you should budget around €3,500 on average to be truly visible on page 1 of Google. However, if your field is very competitive and you have many pages, the budget could rise to 6 figures. Other costs may accumulate taking into account other forms of marketing and communication, since an invisible website is useless.
Products are normally added by the client after the environment is created by the provider. In that case, there is no additional cost. As for e-commerce features, they depend entirely on what you want. If you want a “basic” shop there will be no additional cost.

Note: After the creation of your site, maintenance packages may increase the budget each year. All the solutions presented here have a back office, so it is easy to modify your text yourself, or update plugins yourself. However, if you need new pages, new features, or anything else beyond your knowledge, you will necessarily need to budget the price of a new intervention depending on the time it will take. If you want regular maintenance without additions and without taking up your own time, budget between €50/year and €300/year.

Know the Exact Cost of the Provider

To determine the exact price of your online shop, you will need to find out the ADR (Average Daily Rate) of the provider or providers who will create your site. An ADR defines the salary per day — it is also possible that they will quote you an hourly rate. Thus, you can assign a budget taking each person’s ADR into account. For example, Bob is a developer and web designer — he will create your site alone at €400/day. Thus, by paying Bob for 1 week you will pay €2,000 for your e-commerce site. Obviously, Bob may inform you that creating your site requires a minimum of 2 weeks given your requirements, i.e. €4,000. To determine the exact price, you will need to ask the person or persons concerned. In any case, the price they set depends entirely on the time they will take to create your website based on their ADR. That is what a quote price corresponds to.

Why Are Quotes Never Equal?

The price of a quote depends on the time spent on creating a site. Thus, if A needs to spend 2 weeks on the site and B spends 3 weeks, B will be more expensive. That is not the only factor. It is imperative to take into account the provider’s expertise (which often influences their ADR). Let us say A costs more per day than B. In that case, it is possible that in 2 weeks A ends up being more expensive. Warning: you have no idea what someone who is not an expert in their profession can cost you — perhaps A should be chosen. Also, if your specifications are not defined or precise, it is possible that one might choose additional features but not the other. Finally, it is also possible that one has much higher base quality criteria and therefore higher costs. In short, if one quote is twice as high as another for the same brief and the same specifications, that in no way means you should necessarily take the lower one. To make your final decision, it is imperative to compare the projects completed by each, their certifications, and even their own sites to determine their true skills and quality differences.

E-Commerce Site Creation at createur2site

Here, e-commerce site creation starts from €1,599, including hosting and the domain name if you wish to use an Open Source tool. It is obviously possible to allocate an additional budget if you want more time spent on design, features, SEO, etc. Finally, depending on the complexity of the site you want and your brief, the minimum price may be higher. The best thing is to talk about it directly!

Summary: The Price of an E-Commerce Site

To summarise, the creation of an e-commerce site using a SaaS tool will average €2,500 + €380/year. The creation of an Open Source e-commerce site will, on average, be around €2,500 + €200/year. If you add SEO, you can easily add €3,000 — it should be noted that SaaS tools are much more difficult to optimise for SEO. Finally, these prices are average prices. To get the price of YOUR e-commerce site based on your needs and the choice of your provider, you will necessarily need to request quotes from the relevant people, whom I hope you will have chosen carefully.