How Much Does a Shopify Website Cost?

What type of product does your business sell? Clothes? Jewelry? Regardless of what type of product you sell at your store, the online marketplace can give you access to a massive untapped audience at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a physical location. If you access any website pricing calculator, this fact will become overwhelmingly apparent. However, If you are like most business owners, you might be a little skeptical about our previous statements, and that’s ok. Consider this. Regardless of what state you are reading this from, just think about how many people have access to your store every day. How many people are there that could walk into your store easily? 100,000? Or maybe 300,000? If your store is located in a big city like New York, the number might be closer to eight million, which, by all accounts, is a huge audience. However, there were more users that made a purchase on a Shopify website from August of 2017 to August of 2018 than there were people living in the states of New York, California, Florida, and Texas combined!

According to the Census Bureau, there are over 107 million people living in these four states in 2018, and according to data released in August of 2017 by Shopify, 131 million people made a purchase on a Shopify website over the course of the previous year. So, as these facts demonstrate, owning a Shopify website online can give you access to millions of customers worldwide. However, most business owners are hesitant to build a website using the Shopify platform, because they are unaware of the overall cost of building a website on Shopify.

Upfront Shopify Website Costs

Shopify is one of the biggest online platforms for building an e-commerce website in the world, and there are two types of costs that you can expect to pay when you are having a Shopify website built, recurring operating costs and upfront costs to have the website built by a web designer. The amount of upfront website costs will depend on the amount of features you want to offer your website’s visitors. A basic Shopify website will usually cost $3,500 to $5,000, and will generally include the following features:

• Professionally designed ecommerce website structure that can accommodate up to 25 products
• Basic five field contact form
• On year of website hosting
• Up to 10 pages of professionally written content

A basic website can be effective for small startup companies. The structure of the website itself allows you to focus on a small limited amount of products, but your website needs to be focused on the user and designed in a manner that allows you to efficiently manage your Shopify website. As such, paying for additional features in the beginning can yield a higher return on your initial investment in the long-run. As such, a fully optimized website will normally cost $6,000-$10,000 and it includes features such as:

• 35-42 pages of professionally written content
• Search engine optimization
• A product catalog
• An advanced product filter
• Email marketing integrations through MailChimp
• Related products feature
• Abandoned cart feature
• Custom payment gateway
• Custom cart page, email notifications, and invoices

Recurring Shopify Website Costs

After your website has been built, there are certain recurring costs associated with using the Shopify platform. These costs can be divided into two separate categories, Shopify platform costs and per purchase charges that are incurred when a customer purchases an item from your online store. You have three different plan options on Shopify:

• Basic Shopify ($29 per month)
• Shopify ($79 per month)
• Advanced Shopify ($299 per month)

The basic Shopify plan includes critical features such as 24 hour tech support, manual order creation, discount codes, discounts on shipping labels, use of the Shopify point-of-sale application, and more. Both the Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans include all of the features included in the Shopify basic plan, and other more advanced features such as the ability to use gift cards, professional performance reports, enhanced discounts on shipping labels, etc. The plan you choose should be based both on the size of your current business and the amount of online business you expect to attract after your website has an established online presence.

Per Purchase Shopify Website Costs

Other costs are charged on a per purchase basis, and should be incorporated into the price of each item you sell on your website. Moreover, these charges vary based on the type of Shopify plan you sign up for, and some are calculated as a percentage of the overall value of the purchase. The per purchase for charge for each Shopify plan is listed below.

Shopify for Mobile Users

The way people view and purchase products online is changing rapidly, and purchasing products with a smartphone or mobile device is the future of ecommerce, and owning a website that doesn’t cater to mobile users can negatively affect your Shopify website’s overall performance in major way. According to recent research conducted by Google, people who have a negative experience on a mobile website are 62% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future than if they would’ve had a positive experience. As such, you should always build your website with responsive web design techniques to cater to website visitors that use mobile devices to view your website.

Responsive websites detect the type of device a website visitor is using to view a website and automatically adjust the size and structure of the website to accommodate the screen size of the user’s device. Ensuring that your Shopify website is both responsive and structured to accommodate mobile users is a critical aspect of owning a retail website, because in retail specifically, a one second delay in mobile page loading speeds has been found to reduce conversion rates by 20%. This twenty percent drop in your website’s conversion rate directly translates into a 20% drop in your Shopify website’s revenues due to the nature of your website’s business model.  

Are you ready to Build your Shopify Website?

The Shopify website designers at On The Map Marketing have you covered! Our team of web designers specialize in building and optimizing Shopify websites specifically. We will thoroughly explain how your website will be built, allow you to choose the features that best fit your needs, and help you develop an in-depth plan that outlines the costs associated with building and maintaining your Shopify website. Moreover, all the websites designed by our web designers are both responsive and structured to accommodate desktop and mobile users, so call On The Map Marketing today to speak with our team of website design specialists to find out we can help you build your Shopify website.