Cheapest ecommerce website builder
Ecommerce has been forecasted to be undergoing a massive adoption in the coming years. This has lead to more eCommerce companies and stores being set up to take advantage of this trend. If you are also interested in setting up your personal store to sell stuff, there are currently many easy options for you to do so. In this article, we will take a closer look at the cost for each of these eCommerce website builders. The focus here is to cater to eCommerce beginners so I will only be analyzing hosted eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce which are easier to set up.
Specifically, I am doing a price comparison of Shopify vs Volusion vs BigCommerce vs Magento Go. I will also be breaking down the cost in terms of different components so that anyone who wants to create an ecommerce website will know what are the things to look out for.
Set up cost
Both Shopify and Volusion offer free trials for 14 days. Magento Go offers a more generous offer of 30 days. This means there is no expenses to setting up for the first few weeks. This is good news for eCommerce beginners who might not want to risk a lot of their capital at beginning. It is also a good way for them to test drive the platforms before committing further.
Monthly cost for 100 products or SKUs
For an eCommerce beginner, carrying 100 products or SKU should be sufficient to get started. For this range of products, what are the monthly pricing plans are offered by the four eCommerce software providers?
| Ecommerce website builder | Volusion | Magneto Go | BigCommerce | Shopify | Site123 |
| Price Per month | $15 | $15 | $24.95 | $29 | Free |
| Percentage of sales | None | None | Not clear | 2% | None |
| Amount of storage | 1 GB | 200 M | 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
Updated Sept 2016: Site123.com now offers the best deals. For beginners, you don’t pay anything at all. Check out the site now for more information.
On first glance, Volusion seems to be the cheapest ecommerce website builder for beginners who is selling under 100 products. Of course there might be other factors such as ease of use but most of these ecommerce builders are pretty straight forward in terms of usage.
Next upgrade cost
Beside looking at the monthly cost for 100 products, it is also important to consider the next upgrade. This longer term consideration is for those who aims to have a growing business online and will mostly likely need to upgrade to expand the product offerings. In such scenario, what kind of monthly cost do you need to factor in if you go from 100 products to 1000 products?
| Ecommerce website builder | Volusion | Magneto Go | BigCommerce | Shopify | Site123 |
| Price Per month | $35 | $65 | $79.95 | $59 | $9.8 |
| Percentage of sales | None | None | Not clear | 2% | None |
| Number of products | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 2500 | NA |
| Amount of storage | 2 GB | 800 M | 5 GB | 4 GB | 5 GB |
Updated Sept 2016: Site123.com now offers the best deals. For as low as $9.8, you can most of what the other platforms are charging. Check out the site now for more information.
On first glance, Volusion is once again the cheapest for the next upgrade. However, because Shopify charges USD59 for selling 2500 products, a more accurate pricing for selling 1000 products is around USD23.60. In this sense, Shopify becomes the cheapest option when you want to start growing your business from selling 100 to 1000 products.
For completeness, I have attached their pricing plans below for you to take a closer look
Site123 pricing plan
Shopify pricing plans
BigCommerce pricing plans
Magento Go pricing plans
Volusion pricing plans
Cheap doesn’t mean best. Most of these guys will have your data held on their closed system, so if you ever wanted to migrate you are stuffed (unless you pay them money for a limited slice of your data). You will find things like passwords will not be exported, meaning a migration will force users to change password, the database cannot be exported, meaning you will get a dodgy CSV file to try and decipher your product from plus you will have to work out a way to link all your images again after scraping their site for them. I’ve been there for a client or two. Its a royal pain.
The #1 thing you want to avoid is having someone else dictate your hosting environment and limits as it is usually proprietary – you are tied to their system only, their fee structure and they will not help you move away from it easily.
With Magento (but the Community edition, not Go) you can run it on your own hardware and control your own MySQL database. Also it has a brilliant API for integrating with other software. Most importantly, you are in full control. It costs nothing. The hosting is the cost – and you can get a lot more bang for your buck. Volusion’s $125/mo ‘deal’ would be comparable to just a small segment of a dedicated, unmetered server for the same outlay. Try UK2 or someone for a comparison. You can even get free Magento front-end templates if you’re no designer.
If you’re lazy, go with one of these in the article. If you want to keep your fair share of the profits, dig deeper. Where there’s ecommerce mentioned, everyone will try and take a cut. The trick is to cut out the middle man and earn yourself some money instead.
Great comment John!
thnkx for eCommerce website builder
If one is looking for an eCommerce website builder, then it is important to have some good knowledge about the eCommerce web development market in order to get the right one. It would be great to consult with a professional before hire the one because only an expert can show you right way.
magento is best of them all, and affordable as well. thanks for this post
Thanks!! It’s reasonable price for me, i think for all. Everybody finding for cheapest price for the ecommerce website building.