How much should I expect to pay for an e-commerce Wordpress website?

It really depends on how many items you will be selling...the more items the longer it takes to build, and where you have it done. Any GOOD website designer SHOULD include on-site SEO when building your website...this is a very important first step with SEO, without it, you will be fighting an uphill battle with SEO efforts. You are probably looking around $1,500 and up for costs.

Outside of the on-site SEO, there are many variables to consider in doing SEO for your site. It depends on what you are selling, who your target market is, how competitive your market is, what your goals are...etc. Again depending on the above, video marketing may be another alternative with quicker results and lower prices in getting found online.

Jen, no matter how many answers you'll get in this thread, I haven't seen anything better about the costs than this article by Brian Krogsgard: http://www.poststat.us/wordpress-website-cost/
Much text there, but it's worth reading it from a to Z.

The content can be actually applied to almost all sw dev projects, when it comes to costs.

One remark: hourly rates in the article are applied to the US-market, in other countries it may vary. F.ex. if you decide to subcontract/outsource it, the hourly rates might be lower.
Hope this helps.

Jen, The cost will be based on four elements: 1) designers time, 2) the programmers time, 3) the number of pages and 4) How complicated your site / special programs needed. Hourly rates vary by experience, city they live in and if they handle all elements (design & programming) or there are two different people. the article that Nadya referenced is a great starting point for knowledge. With all that in mind, your starting point would be $1500 for a very simple site and the range goes up from there. If you budgeted between $5k and $7.5k for a really nice custom site that is pretty simple to program you should be in the ballpark.

If you go with an individual freelancer they would likely charge between 5-7 thousand for a professional e-commerce website that is mobile and SEO friendly. This is assuming you are selling multiple products. If you go with a marketing company you can expect to pay 10 thousand and up. This includes security and customization that individuals may not focus on. Marketing companies will also do market research and branding that a freelancer may not have experience in. The long term investment when you get a e-commerce site from a marketing company is well worth what you will get out of it. It all depends on what you want to put into the project and what you want out of it.

Skip the SEO for now. How extensive of an e-commerce site are you looking to create? Cost? minimum would be $10.00 per year depending. If you are talking very extensive, then I would not use wordpress as the base. Also, it would seem clear you have never built a website, so you have to ask, who will own the work you hire out to do? When you want updates, fixes or upgrades, are you willing to pay for those? it's amazing how many people think you pay some kid one time and then kill them on constant changes and updates you think should not cost anything.

I refuse to build sites for anyone anymore because of these issues. Even though clearly spelled out in advance in contracts, people have unreal expectations for what they think they want. Drive someone crazy and your costs will be unreal as in the work will never get done or the person will increase your costs as you drive them nuts.

The work isn't hard, just time consuming. Anyone can do it but most won't. Learn some of the basic skills yourself first and then determine what you are willing to ask someone else to do and hire them based on fair pay for fair work.

Hi Jen,

I love to answer this type of question as I am running a company for web development.

E-commerce website would cost around $1000-$1200 with Custom Template, User Friendly Design and SEO friendly Meta and Keyword setting. As you are aware that SEO is an ongoing process and you invest on it on regular basis and if the developer keep SEO in mind while developing the website than it would be easy for SEO guy to bring it on good ranking with keywords.

Just want to tell you that when you start building the website always keep in mind that it needs proper keywords/content and tags to get the site on good ranking at search engines.

Thanks
Ankit Jain

Jen,

The development costs really depends on the total number of non-e-commerce pages you'll have, amount of products/services being sold and how custom the template along with the condition of your files.

Are you talking about taking a high-end Wordpress template and customizing it or building a Wordpress template from scratch? The latter I wouldn't recommend for a number of reasons.

The cost varies widely from freelance to design house based on their overhead, number of employees and their experience.

Dan mentioned $1500. For most designers that will just cover the cost of customizing a high-end template, setting up Wordpress, installing one of the e-commerce shopping carts like Woocommerce and programming all its variables. That won't include adding and programming plugins to the shopping cart.

Depending on how you deliver your products, their description, categories, images, etc. to the developer/designer you can pay from $50 to $200+ per product. You can pay $100+ per non-e-commerce pages on your site.

Will all the content be written or do you need help in writing content? Will you have all the graphical images that will be needed for the website or does the designer have to create and/or search and acquire imagery?

Does the designer have to develop navigational strategy for the site or will you provide that? Will you have a forum as part of the site? Will there be any videos? There are a whole host of add-ons and other questions that must be answered before any designer can provide you with budgetary pricing.

Three years ago we had a client budget $7500 to create new e-commerce site for about 3000-4000 products. He should have budgeted at least 2x that figure and in the end they spent nearly 3x that budget. So e-commerce sites have run into the 6 figures.

There are a number of factors that I consider when pricing a website.
The biggest thing is details or how customized specific each detail is going to need to be. Being able to execute the exact vision of a client is wonderful, but it can make a big difference on cost. From specific placement of objects to the order or the sequence of information being presented, these things can take some serious time of custom development.

Working with startups and small businesses, I've been able to find ways to adjust the scope to their budget.

A completely customized WordPress site running WooCommerce with 20 products and 6 additional pages would likely cost $4000-10,000).

However, if that type of a project wasn't realistic for that business, we could find other solutions such as working from a prebuilt template. This can dramatically reduce the cost to the $1000-$2000 range depending on how much customization would be done to the existing theme.

Much like in real estate and 'location' being important, with any website the design is utmost important depending on the purpose and in the case of ecommerce how well the design interacts with the complex back end. I would not recommend generaic WP templates that arent customized beyond looking like other sites.

Want a good, branded, customized, editable-by-you, attractive, nimble and functional eCommerce site? Figure $5,000–$7,500, or more, depending largely on you and your ability to sign off on design. Of course a good web designer/developer will build optimize SEO on your site and set you up so you know how to maintain good SEO as you add to the site.