There are a few choices a business must make in regards to building a ecommerce website. The factors that will dictate the choice will be based on projected monthly sales, and the retail price of the service or product they are selling. There are a few different solutions with different types of cost overhead associated with them.
There are many factors involved in determining the costs to building a ecommerce site. If you are tech savy, or if you have the resources to hire a tech savy programmer, you could save alot of money.
This article will discuss a few different methods by which one can sell a product or service over the internet. The most expensive type of ecommerce site is the one that does business right from your website. You do not use a store through a online portal, and you do not have to go to a third party website to process the credit card transactions. This type of ecommerce site requires you to have a merchant account, a digital certificate, a shopping cart solution, a database, and maybe a website host. If you are hosting it yourself, one will not need a web host. The benefits to hosting it yourself are the ability to customize all aspects of software and hardware running the ecommerce solution. This can add significant costs, and this solution is only reasonable if you are doing high volume with several thousand dollars in revenue a month. A site using this method can have yearly overhead costs of $5000.
The second option is for you to use a third party payment processing solution that will interface to your website through some programming scripts the vendor provides. Some third parties allow you to customize your page on their site, so it may seem to your customer that they are not really leaving you site. Third party solutions have many different costs. Some offer a flat fee, some offer a percentage of each sale, and some offer a mixture of the two. This type of solution is good if you like to still have some control over your website, but you do not have the volume in sales exceeding several thousand dollars. A site like this can have yearly overhead costs of $200 - $1000
The third option is to use a full third party portal. Your website is in their portal. Many of the times, the cost will be minimal. However, you will not have the flexibility to change aspects such as the look and feel of the site. This option is a poor option, and it is not really recommended. A site like this may have yearly overhead costs of $100 - $500.