What is the cost for developing a Magento shop?

What is the cost for developing a Magento shop?

According to Wikipedia, Magento is an open source e-commerce platform that’s developed using PHP language. Varien Incorporated, a US company developed it, with the first stable release in 2008.

Ever since its inception, the software platform has grown, and it currently empowers thousands of companies and retailer with the best in e-commerce and innovative cloud solutions. The platform is designed to be completely scalable, and delivers robust performance by providing magnificent marketing, SEO and catalogue management tools.

Why do you need an e-shop?

The answer is quite simple. It can help you win over competition, especially if you are a large e-commerce business. It is true that WordPress helps, but only to an extent. WP can power a large website, and you will need several additional plugins to make it function seamlessly.

With Magento, you can easily create an e-shop that can be customised according to your specific requirements.

If you want further proof then here are the stats: Magento is the 2nd most popular ecommerce platform and possesses a market share of 17% when you look at the top 100k sites. The results are for both Magento CE and Magento Enterprise, and as per July 2017 records. The main things needed in an ecommerce solution are probably safety and security, and the capability of selling your products online without a hitch. Magento does it all, and this is the reason why global brands like Olympus, Ford and Samsung prefer to use it.

Cost should not be a major concern while choosing an ecommerce platform. Capability to effectively selling online and guarantee of security are what you need. Keeping that in mind, let’s go into the monetary aspects of setting up a Magento shop.

Magento Editions

As you may well know by now, Magento comes in two editions – Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise. Both these versions have different levels of pricing because they cater to different demands. The Community Edition is free to download while the Enterprise Edition is
definitely not.

However, the similarity is that both are open source. The Enterprise Edition of the platform comes with some advanced pre-built features, hence, the pricing difference between the two. Expenses incur for the programming part, the hosting requirements and specific extensions that will give your client additional functionalities.

If you visit Magento website, you will see that there are two kinds of pricing plans. One is for Magento Commerce Starter, which is meant for small businesses and startups just embarking on their online journey. The expenses for them start at $2,000 per month. For the Magento Commerce Pro version, recorded for big companies requiring enterprise grade reliability and availability, the prices would start at 3417 per month. Of course, the features and support will be dependent on the pricing plan.

As explained earlier Magento’s EE is not free, and it was mainly intended for huge ecommerce stores with extensive business requirements, both B2B and B2C businesses. In November 2015, Magento 2 was launched, this being the second version of the EE, and its license fee starts from $18,000 per year. It comes with EE features, performance updates, support etc. If you are currently using Magento 1x, then you must upgrade to 2 after 2018. And for a full fledged website, the overall budget for a Magento EE would start at somewhere around $22,000. Of course, it also depends on the developer costs, and other factors like:

• Personalisation
Additional functionalities for marketing development
• Customer support
• Security
• Scalability
• Mobile friendly
• Troubleshooting
• SEO
• Catalog and order management
• Data migration
• Debugging
• Other additional features

You will need to hire a Magento developer, and the hourly cost for a skilled developer would be at $100. Of course, you can also get developers at $20 per hour, but skill level will be lower. On an average, you will invariably need to spend $50-$65 an hour for an average quality developer if you are on a budget.

The differences between the two versions: CE Vs. ME

Magento CE may be free to download, but it does not come with professional support, just a message board that you can refer to. However, the EE version gives off professional reports and tech support teams to ensure smooth functionality of your website.

ME allows for customisation, so that means you can make your online shop unique and different from the millions of similar other shops in the e-world. It gives you a lot of possibilities through which you can make your website as dynamic and responsive as possible.

Cost for a basic Magento Website Cost: $20,000 to $42,000

Inclusions:

• Under 6000 SKU’s
• Pre-built theme
• Configurations
• Customisation
• Testing
• Simple Design Implementation
• Transactional emails with Logo
• POS (Point of Sale) Integration
• Latest Magento CE
• SSL Set Up
• Product & Category Setup followed by Configuration
• No Integration with Back Office Systems
• Basic Shipping & Tax Configuration Set Up
• Internal (QA) to check for cross-browser compatibility
• Checking the functioning of all features

Cost for a custom Magento website: $42,000 – $100,000 and up

Usually bigger and very established retailers for whom most of the businesses are done online choose this option. They need a complete solution to online selling, complete with a business continuity plan for scalability.

Costs are not limited to the following. This is just to give you a basic idea:

• More than 6000 SKU’s
• SEO Starter & Advanced Package
• POS Integration
• Multilingual Store
• Custom Pages
• Custom Banner/Graphics
• Single Page Checkout
• Validating address at Checkout
• Advanced Reviews
• Auto-Complete Search
• Gift Registry
• WordPress Blog Integration
• Social Media Sharing Option with Facebook login
• Testing
• Data Migration
• Advanced Shipping Configuration
• Code Documentation
• Warranty and Support
• QA
• Back office Accounting Systems, Rewards Program, other Affiliate Marketing programs

Cost for Magento Enterprise – $10,000 – $250,000

For an ME website, you have all the features mentioned in the custom website plus several more that would be consistent with your website. For example,

• Mobile commerce
• Custom coupons
• Full page caching
• Multiple stores
• Large amount of SKUs
• Targeted marketing/promotions. etc.

Closing thoughts

The cost will vary in different regions. The rates are not the same in UK and India. And it will also be dependent on the extent of functionalities required. It would be advisable to consult a Magento Development Company and discuss your requirements with them to know the exact cost.

Once you have zeroed in on the right Magento developer or agency, you have opened the doors to countless possibilities of customising your e-shop with exciting features and functionalities.

Interesting Articles:
Details for the cost for developing Magento
Price for e-commerce website development

Picture Source: Flickr.com/ Aljo/ Rafael

The author: Reema Oamkumar is engaged as a thought leader at www.Software-Developer-India.com which is a part of the YUHIRO Group. YUHIRO is a German-Indian enterprise which provides programmers to IT companies, agencies and IT departments.