How Much Does Magento Ecommerce Cost?

Here’s some of the questions we will ask to understand in more depth about your business, that will most certainly have an impact on the cost of creating a new Magento store.

What is the desired go live date or any critical milestones for the project?

We often hear from customers, the need for the website to be fully live and operational for a forthcoming trade show or be ready in time for their busiest trading period such as Christmas, for example.  This can apply pressure to both agency and client and may result in higher costs to double up resourcing to prepare the website in time for a key milestone.

What are the more unusual processes or features of your business that the website needs to cater for?

This question can unlock where there is the need for custom functionality over and above what native Magento can cater for. For example, some manufacturers need to offer Create a Quote functionality or there is a need to deal with dozens of customer pricing tier scenarios.  Perhaps your business needs to take pre-season orders, or you may need to cater for back orders in a specific way on your ecommerce store to fit with a legacy ERP system.  These kinds of bespoke requirements will fall under Custom Magento Development and will be quoted in addition to native Magento set up.

Do you use any third-party systems on your existing website that need to be carried over to the new website? 

Third party systems can range from customer review platforms like Trust Pilot, personalisation providers like Clerk.io, email marketing systems such as Dot Mailer or Mailchimp.  These require costs for installation and configuration to integration to your new Magento ecommerce store.

What multi-channel capabilities will your new Magento Ecommerce store need?

Many businesses these days are very interested in accessing the lucrative marketplaces of eBay and Amazon, perhaps selling product via social media platforms and offering services such as Click and Collect, Reserve in Store, Find Stockists and Store Locator.  With the ever-growing demand to offer customers the ultimate in choice, speed and convenience, these types of services are being readily incorporated into many of our Magento ecommerce builds or added on later.

How do you want to handle customer service requests?

Websites that can cater strongly to many aspects of customer service can reduce the cost to serve customers through the reduction of incoming phone calls and email enquiries.  Providing excellent levels of detail on product pages from video to high resolution zoom functionality, multiple images, strong product descriptions, comprehensive sizing guides, product reviews and more, to leave no stone un-turned to aid the web visitors buying decision will pay dividends.

Live web chat facilities, social media catering to incoming customer enquiries will handle those customers who need quick and fast answers and don’t want to wait to phone or email.

Fantastic delivery pages, hassle free returns information and FAQ pages are very important, but presenting them in a way that will aid your customers buying decision and allow them to access the information with speed, will make the real different.

Not forgetting dealing with your international customers. If your analytics are telling you there is rising demand from the US or European customers, investing in more payment methods, currency converters, language translations, geo targeting and international ordering FAQ pages will help you capture incremental sales from abroad.

What warehousing and order management systems will you use.

This is a big one and a very important element of many businesses, who want to streamline and automate their ordering processes as efficiently as possible.  This can be a significant investment.

Seeking out specialist integration teams who have prior experience with ERP systems implementations is a very good idea.

We will want to know details about your warehouse and order management system, and whether these form part of a bigger ERP system. Whether the business has multiple warehouses and where stock level information is derived from and how it currently works.

Integration experts will map out the current way of working, where your pain points are and identify opportunity areas to create more efficiency either within the existing system or if the timing is right, recommend new systems that may be worth exploring for an upgrade.

How do you want deliveries to work?

Understanding your current delivery set up and how it may need to be enhanced for the new Magento ecommerce store is a vital aspect.

What countries you ship to, who are your delivery carriers, what service level agreements you may have in place, whether there are specific delivery calculations based on weight that are needed.

Or in a wholesaler’s case, delivery thresholds that will need to apply.

There is much more beyond these questions to consider, including custom design requirements, data importing, content writing, marketing and merchandising needs.

These are just a few of the questions an agency like ours will ask to work on establishing costs for your new Magento ecommerce store.  In general, we find at the lowest end of the scale we can build very simple B2C sites on native Magento functionality starting from £12,000.  With some of our most complex builds on Magento Enterprise, with a network of international multi-stores can extend up to £200k.