What is the price of building a magento web store

Why magento?

There are roughly 250,000 Magento 1(retired as of June 1 2020) and Magento 2 webstores. 

Magento is the dominant web store platform for larger e-commerce websites today, but magento is by no means the easiest to work with. In general if you were to have a small web shop with only a few hundred products and no complex requirements I would go with another platform. 

Where magento really shines is when you have any of the following requirements 

1. Scalability

2. Complex or customized requirements

3. Large amount of cross-border Ecommerce 

Scalability 

There is essentially no limit to how large your store can grow with magento, but scalability also comes at a cost. 

A stack which might be suitable for running a store with 1000 transactions per day would be nowhere robust enough to handle 10,000 transactions per day. 

As magento is self-hosted, you yourself will have to scale up your magento stack to handle any increase in traffic. Depending on the velocity of your growth, you might have to have an in-house developer, or an agency with whom your work in close collaboration with to handle any growth you might experience. 

Reference architecture of Magento Deployed at Amazon Web Services

You could also spin out enough capacity to handle any expected growth for e.g. the next 12 months but those EC2 instances with add up in cost real quick.

Complex or Customized Requirements 

As magento is an open source platform, there is essentially nothing you cannot do if you got the money to pay for it. 

The requirements, which cannot be fulfilled by any off the shelf solutions, might be either front-end or backend, and in both cases magento will not let you down.

It might be that you need to offer customizable products such as Mapify or it might be that you need to get magento to play nice with one of your old legacy systems. 

Cross-border Ecommerce 

Magento really shines when you go global. You can easily run it on multiple languages, with different checkout flows and checkout solutions for each market.

Although you might be starting in just one market, it is worth keeping in mind that you might be growing outside of your home market in the future and planning for future growth never hurts.

Just some of the large companies using Magento for their cross-border ecommerce.

I am sold, what’s the cost? 

I am sorry to say, Magento is expensive. 

Very basic store

You could get a Very Basic magento store up and running for as little as a 3000-5000USD, a store like this would include 

• Frontend design using a template, e.g. https://artiksdesign.fi/black-picture-frame-30x45

• Mostly or only simple products (e.g. a product with no configurable options such as this one )

• One language and one domain

• A basic checkout

We would not recommend magento for a store like this, there are better options. As you might have noticed, the above list doesn’t include things such as tracking or price feeds either, so this really is just an barebones store and it would probably be buggy in the frontend as well. 

If you have a budget for 3000-5000USD/, go with something else, such as for example Shopify+Klarna

Customised Magento Store

This is the level at which it starts to make sense to use magento, but it comes at a cost of 20,000USD+

This would include things such as 

• Custom frontend designs to match your branding 

• Configurable and bundle products, e.g this

• Localization to numerous markets, including translations, custom checkout options, custom shipping 

• Custom integrations to backend systems lacking an off the shelf integration, for example for Depalma we built and integration between magento and Centra

• Custom products, such as the Inspirational poster on Artiks

How much your magento store will cost in the end, but if your requirements are any of the above you are definitely looking at a total cost of 20,000USD+. 

Centra is a leading wholesale platform for clothing in Sweden, and an integration with magento enables you to have your retail and wholesale sales in one place.

Cost of running a magento website

Unfortunately the cost of a magento website doesn’t end once you go live, there will be monthly running costs, not only hosting, but you will probably need your developer to fix a thing or two and provide you with tech support.

In the end, how much the monthly costs will be once you go live will mainly depend on yourself. A lot of the tech support can be avoided by reading magentos own excellent manuals, but you won’t be able to avoid doing updates every now and then(even if only doing the security updates magento release almost bi-monthly)

Then there is always, you might want to add some new bells and whistles to your store every now and then :)

Sign me up

It usually takes 3-4 months from project start to go live with a magento store, but depending on the complexity of the project it might take even more time. We generally discourage aiming to go live just prior to your peak sales season, but instead we advice that you aim to go live 1-2 months prior to peak season so that if there are any unnoticed bugs(which unfortunately might happen despite rigorous testing) these can be fixed prior to peak season. 

Drop us a line bellow.