Budget for Magento Store

Budget for Magento Store

Selling products and services online is a good way to expand your business even more. If you are a business owner and want to start to sell your product online, then one of the very first thing which you have to do is to choose an E-commerce platform to use. If you never do it before, then it can be a tough decision.
There are several available E-commerce solutions in the market now. Of course, as a good businessman, you surely want a solution which can fulfill all your customers need and also your own team who will work with it on the daily basis.
Magento is one of the most popular choices of the platform out there. There are several reasons why people like Magento.
 
Magento is an Open Source platform
People like choices, especially if there is no string attached to that choices. People already get used with freedom to choose whatever options can work the best for them. With the desire for transparency and freedom, open source platform grows bigger and bigger every year. Magento comes with 2 general version, Community Edition, and Enterprise edition. As an open source platform, Magento is very versatile and fully customized. That is mean, you can build it based on your own requirements.

Extensions
Magento comes with various kind of extensions to upgrade your online store to the next level. If you can not find any extension you like, then you can hire an expert Magento developer to create a customized one for you. Magento platform acts as the foundation, and the extensions can help bring more personalities and functions into your online store.
 
Multi Store Management
This feature is very useful if you want to be able to manage more than one store at the same time. You can easily share some aspects between two online stores like product catalogs and settings.
 
Large Community
Just like another open source platform, Magento has its own community in the world. There are about 200.000 more businesses out there who currently use this platform. All of them are kind enough to give you free advice and solutions if something wrong happens with your Magento store. This surely will give you a huge benefit. You can fix small problems by yourself instead of hiring an expensive developer.
Those are some common benefits which you can get from using Magento. Now, the main question here is : How much will it cost to own a Magento store? There are so many answers for that one question, but unfortunately, it will be a bit hard to give you a simple, straight answer.
Just like building a physical store in the real live, the price to create an online store with Magento can vary too. It will depend on some factors. For example, how big the store is? Do you want to build it yourself or hire an expert developer? If you decide to hire someone else to do the job for you, are they have any experience or not?
Basically, there are several costs associated with building Magento store. How high the price you will pay depends on what do you want to achieve and the type of store you want.
While it is true that we can not give you a straight answer or exact numbers, we can give you at least a rough estimation for some of the typical costs you need to pay to build an online store with either Magento Community Edition or Magento Enterprise Edition. We hope this simple guideline can give you the basic idea about how much money you should spend, and prevent you to get overcharged by an irresponsible developer.
 
Magento Community Edition vs Magento Enterprise Edition
Magento Community Edition is free to download and install. It’s also fully supported by the community. Even if it’s free, that does not mean this version is not strong enough to fulfill all your business’s needs. Magento is easy to manage and yet complex at the same time. Even with the free edition, you will still need a depth knowledge in programming and coding if you want to create and customize your online store.

Yes, there are many available free sources out there that you can learn from, but keep in mind that Magento learning process can be quite confusing and time-consuming. That is why most business owners prefer to work together with Magento specialist instead.
While the Community Edition is free to use, you need to pay if you want to use the Enterprise Edition (if you want to know the price, go to Magento official website). According to the official website, using Magento Enterprise Edition will make your sales growth become 3 times faster with 50% less cost. That is because Magento Enterprise Edition has a cutting edge site search, powerful merchandising capabilities and the ability to segment customers and target them with personalized content. We can not tell which one is better between Community and Enterprise editions. Both of them have their own plus and minus. You must make a decision based on your own needs.
 
Domain for Your Online Store
Before you can install your Magento and build up your own online store, you need a good domain first. Domain is like your online store’s address Without it, it will be impossible for customers to find your store. Find a unique domain which is suitable with your business and products.

You can buy a domain from several websites out there, like GoDaddy, for example. The price of the domain can be varied. You can own a domain start from $9 per year. Usually, the domain seller will send you a reminder when your time almost up.
 
Hosting for Magento
Before buying hosting, always check your Magento’s requirements first. Both Magento Community and Enterprise Edition require you to choose your own hosting service. This is also can be one of the biggest cost you need to consider when building an online store. Not to mention that Magento is a bit picky when it comes to hosting.

Even if it depends on the size of your products and customers, in most cases, Magento consumes a lot of resources, so usually you can not go anywhere with shared hosting.
For an extra safety measurement, make sure the hosting provider already has an experience in hosting Magento. Do not waste your time for an unreliable hosting service. The price can be varied, from $7 per year to more than $500 per month.
 
Magento Themes
The theme is very important, especially if you want to create a store view for your Magento store. In simpler term, Magento theme is a template to add aesthetical features to your store.

Magento themes are available in many places. You can get them from Magento Connect store, or other third-party websites. There are also some expert Magento developers who can create a customized theme for you. All of them are vary in style, so make sure to choose one which suitable for your business the most. Some of those themes also build to be fully optimized for tablets and mobiles.
The prices can be varied, from free to $5.999. Quite expensive, right? But there is no need for you to worry. The price you pay will worth all the features you get from that theme. Most of the pre-made themes in the market are able to fulfill all your basic needs, but if you want something more flexible, you may want to get a customized one instead.
The customized theme is not only can be made based on your business’s special needs, but it can improve your sales too. How? Pre-made themes were made to be sold and used by all the people who bought and downloaded it. If you buy one of them, there is a chance that other online store may use the same theme as you. When your customers see that, they will think your business is unprofessional.
 
Magento Extension
Extensions can be used to add new features in your online store and add its functionality. Do you know? You can use Magento extensions to improve your back-end and front-end store. Making the admin process become easier and offer a better shopping experience to your customers at the same time.

You can get various kind of extensions from Magento Connect Store or other third-party websites. Similar to themes, some of those extensions are free to use too. However, before you download any of them, make sure whether you can get a full support from the creator or not. That way, if there is a bug in that extension, you can get all the help you need.
The price for an extension itself was varied based on its function and complexity. It starts from $0.01 to $15000 or even more. If you can not find any good extension which is suitable with your need, then just like with theme, you can find a good developer to create one from scratch for you.
 
Magento Implementation and Designing Cost
This cost will surely depend on whom you decide to work together with. If you have Magento skills or you are a developer yourself, then you do not have to worry about it (the only thing you will lose is your time, and maybe you will get a headache too).
In average rate, the price to hire a Magento developer’s service is vary from $15 to $50 or more (I read in one site there is a developer out there who rate their service £250.00 per hour!). When you are in the market, looking for a Magento developer to hire, make sure they are a Magento developer with a real certificate.

That is very important because Magento is quite complex and always changes from time to time. After all, a custom-designed website is quite delicate, so you do not want to let someone inexperienced to handle the matter for you. You also need to make sure they have dealt with Magento for some time. A certified Magento developer with more than 5 years of experiences and a list of a portfolio will be a good choice for you.
 
Other Additional Costs
Besides all the main points above, you may still need some things which will add additional costs to your budget, such as :

• Customized logic like order or shipping modules.
• Theme and extension modification.
• Data import (if you have more than 6000 products, you may want to hire another person to input the data for you).
• Content writer (not all person has a good writing skill).
• On-going maintenance and optimization plan.

Those are the costs you need to pay if you want to build a Magento store from scratch. Once again, keep in mind that those are just a rough estimation, and most of them are vary based on several aspects, like where you get them, who you hire, your own needs, etc.
Every Magento stores are unique. There are no two same online stores out there. All business owners always want something different from the others. The only way to get an exact price is by discussing it with your Magento developer. We are a certified Magento developer ourselves. For a store build from scratch, our price starts from $3000 (fixed price). Of course, the price can be higher based on your requirements. Feel free to contact us anytime you want!