Ready to start your online store, but investment figures are not yet clear? Don’t worry, this informative blog will guide you on all your cost-related queries.
However, determining the cost of building an online store is tough. It required several investigations, research, and detailed explanations because the cost varies widely. It depends on aspects such as the platform’s unique requirements, features, functionalities, complexity and more. Additionally, the platform or method you choose to build your store also significantly impacts the pricing.
Considering different ways, you can opt for custom development or choose readymade software to build your online store. Each brings unique advantages as well as disadvantages. In addition, there are several more factors to determine the cost of your online store.
Let’s break down the cost of building an online store in 2025. However, there are no such flat or exact fees that you need to pay. Yet, you take some idea about the initial budget required to start an eCommerce business after going through all the considerations.
When we build an online store, we categorize it according to its business model, characteristics and offerings. Understanding different types of online stores helps businesses decide on features, target audience, approach to interaction, marketing strategies, and more. Explore different types of online stores below that one can build to interact with customers, generate revenue, achieve goals and drive success.
Online Store Based on Participants:
B2C (Business-to-consumer): This type of online store offers products to customers. They supply final products to the customers that they can directly use. There is no such limit on order quantity, order amount and more.
B2B (Business to Business): As the name suggests, in this business model, two business entities interact with each other. They handle a large volume of orders and transactions. This could be the raw material or final products, depending on the requirements.
D2C (Direct-to-Customer): In the D2C business model, brands sell products directly to customers, bypassing intermediaries, which leads to cost-effective offerings. The interaction is the same as B2C; what makes it different is that brands only sell their own products.
Online Store Based on Offerings:
Product-based store: A product-based online store is an eCommerce platform where businesses sell their physical or digital products to customers. They allow customers to browse products, check details, view pricing, proceed to checkout, make payments and get the order delivered to their desired location.
Service-based store: A service-based online storefront offers services instead of selling different kinds of products. However, the rest of the interactions and transactions are similar to a product-based platform. Customers can explore and book services according to their preferences by making payments.
Essential Features Required in an Online Store
To make an online store fully operational, a few essential features and functionalities are required. They help participants interact with the online store and complete transactions. Let’s explore these essential features and understand.
User Registration: Registration or signup is the first step for a customer to interact with the store. It should be straightforward providing multiple options to log in or sign up so that customers can easily start their journey on the platform.
Product Detail Page: The motive of the product detail page is to feed all necessary information to the customer. Hence, your page should be user-friendly, and videos, images, and graphics must be of high quality, content should be loud, explaining features, advantages and capabilities of products.
Advanced Search and Filtering: Advanced search and filtering are other important and essential features on an online store. These features help customers find products faster from a vast catalogue at their convenience.
Add to Cart Option: It isa virtual space where customers add items they intend to buy or browse later. This feature enables customers to save or delete products according to their buying preferences.
Multiple Payment Gateways: Multiple payment gateways offer several payment options and allow buyers to make payments using their preferred one. An online store with multiple payment gateways ensures acceptance of payment through debit cards, credit cards, e-Wallet, UPI, netbanking and more. These payment options provide ease of shopping, enhance the online shopping experience and reduce the cart abandonment rate.
Shipping Management: From inventory management to order processing, label generation to packaging, carrier selection to order tracking and product delivery to return management, this feature streamlines the order fulfillment process and enhances customer experience by ensuring on-time delivery.
Customer Support: Customer support option is also in the list of important features that enables buyers to get in touch with the seller for their queries related to product, return, refund, order tracking, delivery, and many more.
Marketing Tools and Social Media Integration: On the one hand where marketing tools enable sellers to reach out to more potential customers through different marketing channels. On the other hand, integration with social media, one of the most powerful communication channels, enables social sharing options online, allowing visitors to share products on social platforms.
Analytics and Reporting: Overview of metrics, performances and insights required to operate and grow your online store. Analytics and reporting features or tools provide crucial insights on product performance, sales, customer behavior, and other important data that help you make informed and strategic decisions.
Review and Ratings: Online shoppers give preference to reviews and ratings before they make a buying decision. These are social proofs that provide them with real facts and details. For businesses, reviews and ratings help them understand how customers approach their products, what the product’s best qualities are, and what the improvement areas are where they need to work and improve the quality.
Want to Build a Feature-Rich eCommerce Store? We can Help You!
What are the Benefits of Building an Online Store?
Building an online store is not just about taking your business online. However, the store owner can experience its benefits in many ways. Here’s what you can achieve more with an online store.
Wider Reach: Your business can break the geographical barriers and reach beyond locality, unlike physical stores. You can even reach out to the global audience and cater to their needs.
Cost-Saving: Compared to a brick-and-mortar store, you can launch your eCommerce store at a lower investment. It requires lower operational cost and lets you save money that is required to pay the rent, manage the store, utilities, salaries and more.
Easily Scalable: The Scalability option in an online store is another most accepted benefit that you can not easily execute with an offline store. They are built with scalability in mind. You don’t need to relocate and spend a lot of money on construction to expand your business. You can simply grow your online store with minimum effort and expense without any performance degradation.
Streamlined Operations: Managing an online store is easier than an offline or physical store. There are several tools available that minimize the need for additional effort by automating tasks such as inventory management, order fulfilment, customer support navigation and more.
24/7 Availability: Online stores are open for shopping 24/7. It is a significant advantage that you can’t achieve with a brick-and-mortar store. Customers can shop from anywhere and at any time, around the clock.
Enhanced Shopping Experience: Accessibility and convenience are the most attractive benefits of an online store. Customers can make purchases at their convenience. They don’t need to rush to the physical store and stand in line. Buyers can easily place an order from the comfort of their home and devices which ultimately leads to customer loyalty.
Brand Visibility and Customer Loyalty: Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, your presence is not limited to a specific area or location. You reach out to the global customers, which improves brand visibility and helps you build a loyal customer base. In addition, you can plan and execute several marketing strategies for brand awareness, customer engagement and establish long-term relationships.
Valuable Data and Insights: Most importantly, an online store gives you access to valuable data and reports on customer behavior, preferences and more. These valuable insights help you plan your marketing strategies to attract more potential. In addition, you can make informed and data-centric decisions that further help you drive success for your eCommerce business.
Factors that Influence the Cost of an Online Store
Deciding the cost to build an online store is not easy as it seems to ask the question. There are several considerations that you need to take care of before you decide, such as features, functionalities, specific design, integrations and many more. In this section, we’ll discuss the cost that you can’t ignore when setting up your eCommerce store initially.
You need to purchase a hosting plan that is often billed monthly or yearly, anywhere from $10 to $500 or more.
Hosting is a kind of service that helps you store your data or files to make them accessible to Internet users. By choosing a plan, you rent space on the server for storage.
Different Types of Hosting:
There are several types of web hosting. Primarily, you can consider:
Shared Hosting: It is affordable, but multiple websites share the same server resources. Also, increased traffic on the server can affect your website’s speed and performance.
Ideal for: Platform with low traffic
Dedicated Hosting: A single server is dedicated to your website. It offers more control over the server. You can configure and customize according to your specific requirements.
Ideal for: Platform looking for more control over resources and more.
VPS Hosting: In this hosting type, your website is stored on a shared physical server, but with a virtual partition for each user seems like a dedicated one.
Ideal for: Platform looking for scalability
Cloud Hosting: Websites are hosted on a network of virtual servers, distributing the load. The benefit of cloud hosting is, if one server is experiencing performance-related issues due to high traffic, the other ones take charge and maintain the operations.
Ideal for: Platform needs to handle traffic fluctuation and requires high uptime
2. Domain
Businesses pay $10 to thousands of dollars for a domain.
A domain is the address of a website on the Internet. By entering this text into the browser, users find and access your website. Domain is human-readable and corresponds to an IP address, making it easier to remember and recognize instead of using a numerical address.
Aspects Affecting Domain Cost:
Domain registrars set their own prices.
Domain extensions like .com, .net, .org and more also influence pricing.
The registration period also significantly impacts pricing. More duration brings maximum discounts.
Premium domains, such as those containing popular keywords, short in size, easily memorable, or on the name of a popular brand, cost you more than ordinary and uncommon ones.
3. SSL Certificate
Billed annually, costs up to $200/year. Advanced SSL Certificates may cost you more.
Secure transactions and data security are the primary concerns for any eCommerce store. An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate establishes an encrypted connection between the user’s browser and web server to secure transactions and protect sensitive data.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
SSL encrypts data to scramble it so that no one can read or intercept it during transmission.
It helps build trust by encrypting data and verifying identity, allowing users to share information confidently.
Protects data and information against various online cyberattacks, data breaches and threats.
4. eCommerce Platform (Readymade vs Custom)
Building an online store can cost you anywhere between $0 to $50000 or more.
The cost of building your online store depends on the method you choose. Primarily, there are two popular options from which you can choose:
Readymade Software: This solution is considered a quick and cost-effective way to launch an online store. A readymade solution comes with all the essential features and functionalities required for a fully operational online store.
Custom Development: In this development method, you build an eCommerce platform from scratch. Either you can hire the right expert or outsource your project to an eCommerce development company. However, developing a custom online store is a time-consuming and more expensive process.
Development cost can also vary depending on the size of your online store.
Small Scale Online Store: Operating an eCommerce business with a limited product range, focusing on a specific geographical area or niche.
Catalog size: Up to 100 Products
Medium-Sized Online Store: Operating a business with a wide range of products, focusing on a nationwide market.
Catalog size: 100+ to 500 Products
Large-scale Online Store: Enterprise-level businesses are often established in the market with a vast product catalog, catering to diverse industries with a global presence.
Catalog Size: 500+ Products
Want to Discuss the Cost to Build Your Online Store?
Businesses usually don’t pay for UX/UI with a readymade solution. Yet, if custom development is needed due to some specific requirements, then it may cost up to $1000 or more.
An online store with a more complex design and customization needs generally costs you more. However, by choosing the right readymade eCommerce store builder, you can avoid additional expenses required for UX/UI, navigation and designs.
In addition, a market-ready eCommerce software supports all the essential features and functionality needed to ensure seamless transactions on the platform.
Such software is intuitively designed and allows customization at the CMS level which allows you to tailor the store to your specific business’s needs. However, if you are looking for extensive design or customization options, you can either go for the custom development or customize the readymade solution by accessing its source code by asking for experts.
6. Third-Party Integration
Third-party integrations for an online store can cost anywhere from $50 to $20,000, depending on specific requirements and the complexity of custom integrations.
Third-party integration cost is also required to enable additional features, functionality and services to your online store. These integrations may include payment gateways, analytics tools, tax management tools, shipping management tools, SEO and marketing tools, CRM integration and many more.
Here’s a breakdown of potential costs:
Many plugins and extensions have upfront costs, subscription fees, or transactional charges.
In case of custom integration, the cost may vary widely depending on the effort and specialization required.
Some third-party integrations or services require licensing fees to become operational.
7. Maintenance and Support
Ongoing maintenance and support require $0 to a few hundred dollars monthly or yearly.
The ongoing expenses never stop, even after you have launched your online store. An online store requires regular updates, optimization and maintenance to ensure seamless transition, smooth performance and security updates.
Additional Expenses You May Encounter When Building an Online Store
Apart from the above factors and associated costs. There are a few additional expenses that you may encounter to build, launch and operate your online store.
Licensing and platform fees
Regulatory compliance and legal costs
Creating content, graphics and other essential elements
Cost to manage the team
Cost to store a large amount of data for storage and backup
Marketing and promotional costs
Cost needs to scale and customize your store.
Tips to Optimize Cost When Building an Online Store
One can’t avoid or eliminate the necessary expenses required to build an online store. However, by following the tips below, businesses can minimize additional expenses as much as possible. Let’s explore tips to minimize expenses:
Proper market research and competitor analysis are crucial to validate your eCommerce idea. In addition, it further helps you understand the gap that your competitors are missing. In short, market research doesn’t guide you with your idea but also lets you further plan and execute strategies to drive growth and success for your online store.
2. Consider Must-Have Features When Choosing an eCommerce Platform
It is important to understand your requirements before you choose your eCommerce platform. Accordingly, decide on the must-have features to build a fully functional online store. In this way, you can minimize the expenses required for unnecessary features and functionalities.
Must-Have Features:
User Registration
Product Detail Page
Advanced Search and Filtering
Add to Cart Option
Multiple Payment Gateways
Shipping Management
Customer Support
Marketing Tools and Social Media Integration
Analytics and Reporting
Review and Ratings
3. Choose One-time Payment Model
If you want to eliminate continuous recurring or subscription charges, choose the eCommerce software available with a one-time payment option. In the long run, it costs you higher. Again, recurring fees may frustrate users; one can’t predict the final cost, and several more challenges you can encounter.
4. Choose a Readymade Software to Build Your Online Store
The development method significantly affects the cost required to build an online store. Undoubtedly, starting from scratch needs more investment, resources and time compared to choosing a pre-built solution.
Build Your Online Store with Tribe (A Readymade Self-Hosted eCommerce Software)
Tribe is a readymade software that allows you to build your online store quickly and effortlessly. This reliable solution has empowered a large number of businesses, including startups, SMBs and offline stores. Tribe has helped them establish their digital footprint in the eCommerce landscape with a feature-rich platform. It comes with all essential features, pre-integrated third-party tools and more to make an online store easily accessible.
Being a self-hosted eCommerce software, Tribe offers complete control over your platform, allowing businesses to host the platform on their preferred server. In addition, source code ownership, flexibility with customization and scalability support make Tribe a preferred choice among readymade solutions available.
What are the Advantages of launching an eCommerce Store with Tribe?
Launch Your Online Store at $99: With Tribe, you can launch your online store at $99 for installation only.
One-time Cost: Tribe is available at a one-time payment option. You don’t need to pay ongoing monthly or yearly recurring or subscription charges.
Lifetime License: The solution offers a lifetime license to use and operate your online store.
100% White Label: You can rebrand Tribe under your brand name, as it is a 100% white-label online store software.
Source Code Ownership: Tribe provides source code ownership which means you gain complete control similar to a custom-built eCommerce platform.
Fully Customizable: You can customize your online store using its CMS or can go for extensive customization by accessing the source code.
Supports Scalability: The platform has been built with scalability in mind. It supports a growing number of visitors, transactions, products in the catalog and more without degrading performance and facing downtime.
Technical Support: To help you deal with unexpected issues, bugs and errors in the software, Tribe also provides technical support for free.
Native Mobile Apps: With Tribe, you can also launch your online store mobile apps for Android and iOS users, enabling them to have an enhanced shopping experience using their preferred devices.
Final Thought
The number of online shoppers has increased at a good pace over the past few years. However, it is not surprising that a significant percentage of shoppers prefer making purchases online. They are used to it. Convenience, immediacy, discounts, options, and, of course, doorstep delivery, are primary reasons to attract buyers.
Why not build an online store?
Ignoring the power of the rapidly growing eCommerce industry today is like bypassing potential growth opportunities. Businesses running offline stores and having no online presence are losing customers in large numbers.
Therefore, if you are one of them looking for the opportunity to launch your online store, but are worried about the investment.
Don’t worry, cost is not a barrier. You can start your eCommerce journey starting at $99 with Tribe. However, in the above blog, you have gone through all the necessary expenses that you can also minimize with experts’ guidance.
FAQs
How much does it cost to build a mobile app for an online store?
The cost to build a native mobile app for your online store can cost you between $10000 to $50000 or more, depending on your specific requirements.
However, with Tribe web app, you can own a mobile app for $999 for Android or iOS. Click here to learn more.
What is a cost-effective way to build an online store?
Today, a large number of entrepreneurs and business owners are building their online stores using SaaS-based solutions and readymade software. Both of these options are more cost-effective than developing a platform from scratch. However, when it comes to gaining similar control, flexibility, and ownership like custom-built online stores, a readymade solution is a preferred option.
Tribe is one of those readymade solutions that allows you to launch your online store starting at just $99, offering lifetime access with no recurring or subscription charges. The cost is almost similar to a monthly subscription of a feature-rich SaaS-based solution. It means that by paying a one-month subscription fee for a SaaS, you can own Tribe, a readymade online store software for a lifetime.
Can I customize my online store launched with Tribe?
Ans. Yes, Tribe is a fully customizable eCommerce software that allows you to customize and align your online store according to your specific business needs and customer preferences.
All innovation starts with an idea to solve real-world problems. At FATbit Technologies we are passionate about driving digital transformation to prepare businesses for a digital-first tomorrow. Let’s discuss your BIG idea NOW.
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Vishal Tiwari is a writer with a passion for crafting engaging and informative content on diverse topics. With a keen eye for detail and a knack for storytelling, he brings a unique perspective and expertise to adapt his writing style to suit various audiences and industries.
