When you land up to this page, you can be one of the following:
- Online Merchants who want to build an online store
- Magento Development Company owners wanting to outsource your client’s project
- Consultants or Freelance developers looking to outsource your Magento development project
- Bloggers who want to write about Magento
James was a painter based in Australia and he thought of selling his artwork online. We received a call from him the other day. This is a glimpse of the conversation our project manager had with him:
James: I’m looking to develop a small ecommerce store for selling my paintings. Can you help?
Project Manager: Of course. What features do you require for your website?
James: About us page, product showcase, and online payment option. How much will the website cost?
Project Manager: We’d suggest you to build a Magento web store.
James: Will I be able to add new paintings on my own?
Project Manager: Yes, you would have full control over your website and you don’t need any technical knowledge for it.
James: Great. What would be the cost of such website?
Project Manager: Please provide me your email ID so that I can share a detailed feature list for your website.
Our team sent an email with detailed price estimate and feature list in the next couple of hours. We offered him quote for basic functionalities along with easy payment options. We also shared our past work samples and portfolio of Magento stores that we had developed. He had already collected quotes from 10 other Magento development agencies and compared them. As he was a start-up, he did not have enough money to invest in for ecommerce development. He was impressed with our portfolio and prompt responses. So, he called us to know why our quote was higher than the other companies.
Conversation between James & Project Manager:
James: Hey, I liked the samples of your websites. I got a quote from a few other companies and that’s 5 times lesser than yours. How can you justify that?
Project Manager: We are very transparent with our prices and timelines. We have worked on 200+ Magento projects till date. Unlike freelancers, we always meet the deadlines, and ensure that you get the best value for every dollar you spend. We’re backed up with certified developers and expert business analysts who build effective web stores that make a lot of money in the long run.
James: I’ve never worked on a CMS website before. Will your developers be able to teach me how to manage my site on my own?
Project Manager: There’s nothing to worry about. We’re available 24 X 7. Once your website is completed, we would guide you to make the changes on your store.
We suggested him to use free themes and extensions for his ecommerce store. He also wanted to integrate his website with his existing backend system. Our team discussed all the aspects of ecommerce development with James over the call and explained him that some Magento development companies that offer low cost solutions may be incapable of delivering the best value for money. You may end up paying a lot more than the actual cost of store development.
James was quite satisfied with the openness and transparent nature of our project managers, and he wanted to talk to our Magento developers. We arranged a call with our certified programmers and they solved all the queries James had about the project. We signed a contract with him and started working on his project.
Top brands that use Magento as their base platform:
- Nike
- Olympus
- Liverpool FC
- Pepe Jeans
- Zoetis
- Pepe Jeans
How much does the website development cost? – This is a common question in the minds of ecommerce store owners. People who want to save money with Magento ecommerce website development should read this article and follow these tips.
Article Summary:
- Avoid selecting costly themes or don’t opt for custom theme development
- Choose cost effective of Magento Extensions
- Never ignore User Experience
- How PWA will affect UX for Magento 2 stores?
- Centralize your Inventory Management
- Don’t forget SEO benefits
- How to build the website? In-house or Agency
- Maintenance and Support
1. Don’t select an expensive theme or avoid custom theme development
Whether you develop ecommerce web stores or just have stakes in the Magento industry, you’d know the importance of themes for online businesses. A few clients opt for custom theme development for their Magento stores. You can reduce the cost of Magento development by choosing free or low priced theme from Theme Forest or Template Monster.
Choosing the right Magento theme at budget-friendly prices can be a good option to save Magento web development costs. If you’re able to get theme for free, it will be like an icing on the cake. Magento platform offers both free and premium themes. We selected the best responsive and cost effective themes for James’ ecommerce website to achieve his business goals.
Some of the Magento developers or website owners choose heavy themes for the online stores. This decreases the response time, and reduces the page loading speed. Be wise enough to find the right theme that is not so heavy on your pocket. We’re happy to build a fast loading website for our client with free Magento themes.
2. Choose Free or Low Cost Magento Extensions
Nobody would like to travel in a rowboat without oars. Same is the case with extensions for Magento stores. You may want to add the functionality of one-step checkout to your store. Or you may be looking for inventory management extension. As James needed social media integration, we installed the right suitable extensions for his web store. No matter what kind of functionality you need, do not worry there is an extension available for these functionalities. Many startups and small companies may not have a huge budget to invest heavily in Magento extensions to add the desired functionality to the online store. Fortunately, there are a few Magento development firms that offer extensions and modules for free.
Related Blog– How to Increase eCommerce Sales with Magento 2 Extensions
Some extensions are free while some others may range from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars. It can be a good idea to choose free or low cost Magento extensions to save a few dollars while developing your website. One can pick the right extensions that are compatible with each other and also verify that support and after-sales service would be provided by the seller. There are a few providers who offer an option to try the extensions for free for a particular period of time. You can try those and pay for them only if you find them useful.
Wondering what’s the difference between free and paid extensions for Magento 2 store? And you aren’t sure about using free ones for your ecommerce website?
Well, there’s no harm in using free Magento 2 extensions. You can seek advice from our developers developer to help you pick the right ones. Being a leading Magento Development Services provider company, we can install the best suitable extensions to improve the performance of your magento store.
3. Never ignore User Experience
For sure, Magento 2 offers a better UX as compared to Magento 1. Make sure that your web store is easy to navigate for shoppers. The user should be able to land up to the right product page for what he’s looking for. Even the checkout process should be easy and hassle-free. When you make use of Magento 2 ecommerce, it is important to use high quality images to showcase your products in the best possible way.
Here’s what you can do:
- Give meaningful and appropriate file names to each image
- All images should have ALT tags
- Write proper description for the products in ALT tag
The visitors should be able to get answers to their queries easily. You can think of adding a live chat option to your Magento store to get more sales.
How PWA will affect UX for Magento 2 stores?
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a hot discussion these days. Now, you don’t need to build separate websites and apps for iOS and Android. Magento PWA offers a suite of tools for developing an online store that behaves exactly like an app. Magento announced PWA studio that delivers convenience to the online shoppers by providing an awesome buying experience even if they use desktop for buying products.
Let’s have a quick look at the benefits of using PWA for ecommerce:
- PWA brings more users to the store and so, it helps to generate more sales.
- With the help of PWA, your site can adapt to different devices and offers an incredible mobile experience to the users.
- PWA offers great usability and allows offline browsing also.
- Instant page loads offer instant access to your users. Hence, PWA leads to high performance of Magento website.
- It has a great positive effect on the customer loyalty as customers are more likely to return back to our site.
- PWA provides more conversions as they offer app-like performance without forcing the users to download the app in their mobile device.
4. Centralize your Inventory Management
How do you track your orders and inventory? Are you still using excel files and spreadsheets? Do you rely on reports from suppliers to track your inventory? Many ecommerce owners do not realize the importance of an effective inventory management system. Gone are the days when you had to rely on pen, paper, and filing cabinets to track your inventory. You should make use of a cloud-based inventory management system to help you track, organize, forecast, control, and calculate your inventory of all the products in a well-organized manner. You can get real-time data for your stock and orders. No matter at which part of the earth you may be sitting, you can get a 360-degree view of your ecommerce store. It also helps to prevent errors and manual miscalculations.
5. Don’t forget SEO
There are countless horror stories from big enterprises losing money as they do not use the power of SEO for their Magento web store. Though Magento 2 is a highly search-engine friendly platform, you will still have to invest money for SEO. Some ecommerce owners think that they save money by not spending for SEO services. On the contrary, they lose a lot of money without SEO.
Once the ecommerce store was built, he asked us for SEO and social media marketing services to help him sell his artwork online. We made use of the latest tools and SEO techniques to attract more visitors to his store and make more sales. He was happy to receive outstanding results in a short span of time.
If you have an ecommerce store, you need to fix the following issues for your Magento website in order to make it rank higher in search engines:
Hire SEO experts to increase your website organic, referral, & social traffic, keyword ranking, sales and reputation of your brand.
Remove duplicate content: This can be a big problem for any online website. Duplicate content can harm your website and business in many ways. You should ensure that every piece of content on your website is unique and original.
How can you do this?
Go to the Stores >> Configuration >> Catalog >> Catalog >> on right side scroll down to Search Engine Optimization and set Canonical LINK Meta Tags for Categories and Products to Yes.
Not-optimized HTML sitemap: Magento 2 does not support auto-creation of HTML sitemap. Hence, you would need to implement some extensions to solve the HTML sitemap problem in Magento 2. When you use extensions, it auto-generates an HTML sitemap for the users as well as search engines.
Setup an XML sitemap in Magento 2: Magento 2 has enhanced XML sitemap functionality. You can enable it with the following steps:
Navigate to Stores >> Settings >> Configuration >> Catalog >> XML Sitemap.
Optimize product images: Never forget to optimize the images for better search engine rankings.
Modify Robots.txt File: The Robots.txt file instructs the search engine robots about the pages that need to be crawled. You can enter the website URL in browser and add robots.txt. Example: http://www.xyz.com/robots.txt
Issue with Magento 2 default Title and Description: When you set up a Magento store, it will use the default Title and Meta description, and so, you should change that for better rankings.
6. How to build the website? In-house or Agency
If you’ve a tech-savvy team of Magento programmers and IT professionals, you can think of developing your store in-house. If not, you can choose to hire an offshore agency or hire dedicated Magento developers for building your online store. Before hiring us for Magento website development, James thought of hiring on-premises designers and developers. Hiring in-house team may have a lot of HR headaches, salaries, overhead expenditures, and other costs involved. That’s the reason why he hired us of ecommerce store design. i-Verve has a team of certified Magento developers who can help you achieve a successful ecommerce store within the shortest possible time frame. We’re a reputable agency who can be the right Magento development partner to help you get the best solutions.
7. Maintenance and Support
Just like John, you may think you save a few hundreds of dollars by not choosing a Magento maintenance and support plan. What would you do if your website has some issues? You could be losing a lot of business it that happens any time. It can be a wise decision to hire an expert Magento support and maintenance agency to install security patches, check the website and ensure that it works well all the year round. Most of the maintenance and support plans have annual subscriptions. You can choose the best one and get stress-free about your Magento online store. We’re still working with James and providing him annual plans for maintenance and support for his web store and he’s really happy with that.
Let’s Understand How much does actually Magento Website Development Cost?
Selling your product online using eCommerce platform is a good decision, but the only thing that stops customers from proceeding ahead is costing for Magento website development. Costing can be decided in multiple factors that could be your business size, business need, features you need, hours you want developers to work on your website development, etc.
We have tried to ease the problem for you how and what features decide Magento website development cost? Below are the 3 reasons that will help you in rectifying with what you can go with for your Magento website development.
1. Basic Magento website cost ($2500-$5000)
It’s a basic website with a simple to use features and less number of products that will keep you and your users limited from using the advanced features. The functions that you will be limited to are as follows:
- Basic Magento functionality
- Simple design or theme
- Access to Magento community site
- No integration with back office systems
- A smooth CMS
2. Custom Magento Website Price: ($10,000 – $60,000)
If you are a retailer and already have a website and looking to upgrade or migrate from another eCommerce platform to Magento, then you need Magento custom website. The cost do increases compare to basic Magento website development cost but it also gives you extra benefits like
- Custom Magento Design
- CMS and extensions
- Integration With Back Office Systems
- Customer Groups
- Migrations To Host
- Custom Attributes Required To Be Created For Products
Price for custom Magento website would cost you between $10,000 to $60,000 that definitely gives you extra benefits and also gives good engaging experience to your users too.
3. Magento Enterprise Store Pricing ($100,000+)
When you decide you want everything from bottom to that is from order to sales, Magento enterprise store edition is the only solution you should go with. It is world’s most trusted customizable platform that is the first choice of large enterprises and companies. You can sit back and relax as Magento will take care of the key factor you want to be that is “Sales”. Magento enterprise has everything which custom Magento website and basic Magento website module don’t. Some of the additional benefits that include are,
- Personalization and customization to all levels
- Built in modules
- Multiple stores
- Full page caching
- Displaying content as per your requirements and needs- content staging
- Applying product filters
- Flexible and easy deployment options
- Optimized Page caching
- Easy-to-use admin with custom dashboard
- Catalog Management
- Full Site and Content Management
- Free professional customer support
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Mobile Friendly
- Social Media Integration
Hire Magento developers from us to save upto 60% of the development costs
Some offshore clients are hesitant about choosing an agency that is located miles apart. They are worried about regular communication with the team. It can be a good idea to hire dedicated Magento developers from us so that you can have direct control over your project. We can share the resumes and work samples of the available programmers, and you can interview them personally before hiring them. You can communicate with the hired resources regularly and exchange ideas. Direct communication between developers and clients speeds up the development and saves a lot of costs too.
In a Nutshell
Now, you’re aware of the things to consider in order to save on ecommerce development costs. Once you save money on Magento web development costs, you’ll be able to share the savings as customer discounts. You can offer more discounts to your users and make more sales. Contact us
