WEBSITE PRICE COMPARISON COSTS WHEN BUYING AN ECOMMERCE WEBSITE – PRICE vs VALUE?
You have decided you need an ecommerce website. Or you find that the ecommerce website you have is out of date and is in need of some redevelopment work. But, the quotes you have just received, go from one of end of the price spectrum to the other. Website Price Comparison Costs – How do You choose when it comes to Price Vs Value?
So, your in the market to buy a website or redevelop the website you already have. This is either a brochure website or an ecommerce website. Already you are in a website purchasing minefield.
This story is going to centre around the decision you have made to buy and ecommerce website. What governs your decision? Price or Value?
You have reached out to some freelance developers or maybe a small web design agency to get a quote for your website project.
The response has brought some prices that range from a really low cost to something that is in your opinion the extreme. You are not sure what you are getting for your money.
For the purpose of this story let us assume you at least know you want a WORDPRESS/WOOCOMMERCE website.
The first developer who sends in a quote provides a cost of just £600 for your new ecommerce website. £600!! And you can have it in a couple of weeks. So right away there are some clues for you that should allow you to hear alarm bells going off in your head. It should also be indicating to you that the person or even small agency providing this quote is demonstrating that they are so far removed from reality or even fully understanding anything about ecommerce!
Another suspicion you could have on seeing this price of £600? The freelance website builder or small website agency could be using off-shore support. That could be another reason for seeing such a ridiculous low price.
Let’s be frank! Or I can just be, website developer Brian Mathers here at ICTADVISOR, and say, if I was you, I would have absolutely zero faith in a company quoting £600 for an e-commerce build regardless of the website platform…
And if all that is quoted is 10 hours of website coding time?
Now the quote indicates quite simply that for £600 this involves 10 hours of coding time……This is high-school kid stuff, and the sort of fees someone might charge as a complete beginner at building websites. Even then newbie web designer (we would hope) quote more in line with expected industry market costs for a fully-featured e-commerce site….you would hope!!
There is absolutely zero and we mean zero chance you can get anything near satisfactory for any serious e-commerce site with just 10 hours of coding and a £600 price tag.
Here is what you have to take into account to have a successful ecommerce website:
- Do some research of your market place
- Do some website mockups
- UX design (this is aspects of branding, design, usability and function.
- SEO – building a findable website
- responsive design – mobile friendly
- robust backend systems
- speed optimization – achieve a 2.0 secs or less load time for pages
- user testing – providing a positive customer journey experience
- performance bench-marking
- custom integrations – 3rd party software requirements if necessary
- project management – Some who knows the whole process
- (and much more!)
It’s clear that the majority of these tasks could not be completed to a satisfactory level for just £600 and 10 hours of coding… never mind an excellent level with such little time spent on a website project. In our opinion, our own clients have been very grateful where we have managed to step in – before – a botched migration job was put in place.
The clients we look after today, like you, are likely to be up against some serious competition online. So, the level of service and fit for purpose website we’d expect a client to be able to have/want to operate effectively in their competitive e-commerce market place, has to see a more reasonable quote. Website Price Comparison Cost decisions are therefore a huge challenge for the business owner entering into online ecommerce.
What Price an Ecommerce Website?
We are going to begin by saying around the £6k+ region.
But then again, we build serious websites for serious businesses.
Right now there is a Big Commerce project in progress that has a much bigger budget than even that. This project will take hundreds of hours of coding, research, testing and expertise to produce results that will truly let the client compete at a national level – The project burnt through £600 before we even got close to typing a line of code.
You can take it from someone who has a team with a lead tech that built an e-commerce site that’s since turned over in excess of £5million – you need a serious budget to get serious results.
In addition, as some of you may know, we are not a big fan of multi-discipline agencies that can one minute sell printed material like business cards, then turn their hand to building e-commerce sites whilst also at the same time claiming to be SEO specialists, building Apps and making videos etc… that is jack of all trades masters of none type stuff.
As for justifying the cost of a site – just ask a client if they would spend £600 to buy a new Audi? (the level of website we begin deliver) and then expect it to actually have it delivered with an engine, four wheels and a steering wheel! 😂 – of course, you can have a rolls-royce website but you don’t have to be that extravagant to be successful online. We certainly wouldn’t at the same time have you spend money you don’t need to.
So, we are not doing a poo poo look at other developers or agencies or having a dig here. We are simply telling a story about what you would think about doing if given a quote of £600 and 10 hours development time for your next ecommerce website?
Such quotes has to make anyone serious about being online have a good chuckle, the fact they might also come with all the strapline statements like “We are the number 1 ecommerce website builders, or we have been testing lots of other ecommerce platforms and have had encouraging results migrating data over to our own solution.”
This sort of stuff tends to make me and my team think they are perhaps not experts in the promoted platform they are suggesting a client to buy into.
We are not out to bash other companies. We all have our price levels and types of business customers we each want to target and deal with.
But, at such a low number both in terms of cost and man-hours such an agency coming forward with this deal have vastly underestimated everything that’s needed to actually build a decent ecommerce website and make the client money.
It shouldn’t be about billing out hours and going for the cheapest route to market, it should be about putting in place a solution that actually works for the client. Something that will allow the client to scale and succeed online. So when your faced with the Website Comparison Price challenge, think carefully – Price vs Value. Always ensure that your chosen website solution begins by being properly researched and then priced accordingly…but is going to bring value and not a disease we call – Feature Creep……..just our two cents today anyway!
I hope that in sharing some case studies or website client stories here at ICTADVISOR, that anyone reading this sees how much we take pride in having someone’s website in our care.