If you are about to get an eCommerce website built, it’s important to not only budget for the website design and development but to also ensure you are aware of other external costs involved with developing an online store. We have developed a brief checklist for you to help you set out an accurate budget for your project.
1. Build it and they will come..ah well they will if you pay. Marketing is one area of website development that has a few of misconceptions some of which include:
- “ when I type my web address into Google it comes up so I don’t need marketing”- this theory is fine if the only people shopping on your site are people who know your web address, but the fact is you want people who don’t know about you to find you. They will be searching via keywords so you need to optimize your site for these words through a strong marketing campaign.
- “Do I really need marketing, won’t I appear on the search engines once my site is built” – Although your site is verified with Google it doesn’t mean you will appear above all of your competitors. Remember your competitors have probably been around for a while and they have probably got their own well established marketing campaigns not to mention a higher authority and domain authority with Google that you need to compete against.
All in all if you are serious about your online store you need to set aside a decent budget for a professional marketing plan. This could be a mixture of a professionally managed Google Adwords campaign, SEO and traditional forms of marketing.
2. Cover yourself. As in any business you always want to make sure you have all of your terms and conditions and policies in place. Having an online business is no different. You will be required to have the following at least for your ecommerce store when setting up a merchant facility:
- Consumer Data Policy
- Security Policy
- Shipping and Delivery Policy
- Terms and Conditions
You will need to make sure you cost this into your budget when developing an eCommerce website. At Neubreed we have a partnership with Legal Vision and we can secure you a fixed price for all of your legals all for a cost of no more than $1500.
3. Payments. The next item that will involve fees is accepting payments. There are a few options for accepting payments:
- You can use PayPal – this option is fine for lower volume sales but the fees can add up on high volume. You can view their fees here: https://www.paypal.com/au/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees
- You can use Stripe – Stripe is an alternative to PayPal and has lower fees, it also allows clients to pay within the website so they are not leaving your site to make payment. You can view their fees here: https://stripe.com/au/pricing
- Finally you can set up a merchant facility with your bank. When you go to your bank to let them know you are setting up an ecommerce website and you want to accept payments online they will set up what is called a merchant account for you. A merchant account is just a type of account that gives you the ability to take credit card payments from your customers.
Now you have the account and the customer you need the guy in the middle to connect it altogether and this is the payment gateway. At Neubreed we prefer eWay and so do our clients. This payment gateway is supported by 23 banks across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and can be used with all major credit cards.
At Neubreed we build our ecommerce stores complete with Rapid SSL Certificates thus ensuring your customer's banks account or credit card details are safe at all times. (this is the padlock symbol you see on ecommerce stores to let you know it’s a safe place to shop)
If you would like to understand the costs of setting up an eCommerce store in more detail, contact us today on 02 8007 0218
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