how much does a Magento e-commerce cost?
introduction
“Just as a reminder, the MAGENTO solution is a technical platform for creating and managing high-level e-commerce websites. If you’re looking to create a small online store, if you’re new to the subject, if you don’t have much budget and you’re self-funding everything… it’s better to opt for a simpler solution. You don’t hunt flies with a bulldozer!”
magento, what is it ?
Magento is an open-source solution with a free version and an enterprise version costing over $10,000/year.
It’s also a non-community project as the software is entirely designed and maintained by a private American company. Moreover, this company has definitively gained strong credibility with the acquisition by Adobe in 2018 (and gradually rebranding to: Adobe Commerce). Finally, among the users of the solution, we find some major clients such as IKEA or Salomon. That’s the presentation.
“Using Magento for a web service provider is like buying a Formula 1 car. As long as you drive smoothly, it’s just a great experience. But as soon as you want to exploit the capabilities of the beast, if you’re not trained, you quickly find yourself overwhelmed by events.”
In the end, to be serious, you need to send your best programmers for training (like Magento Academy) and not skimp on the days, because it’s serious business. This explains that between the freelancer who improvises as a Magento developer in his garage and the agency that develops real expertise, the price of the website easily goes from €3K to €30K.
to create a serious e-commerce website…
To carry out a serious e-commerce website…
- Study the project
- Study the market, competitors
- Study the target market, consumers, consumption triggers
- Study/develop our offer properly: products, services, prices, positioning, web marketing
- Graphic design with variations, animations… can cost between €5K and €15K
- Technical development, depending on whether we don’t touch anything in Magento or if we need to add specific features, can cost between €10K and … (no limit, of course)
- Hosting will be on a dedicated server (because Magento has a bad reputation in terms of resource requirements)
- Finally, for any e-commerce project, the most important thing will be promotion.
In the end, the investment in the ‘shop software’ should not represent more than 10 to 20% of your investment in the first year because you need to keep some for natural referencing, paid referencing, emailings, affiliate operations, product comparators, possibly advertisements on affinity sites…
In our humble opinion, an e-commerce website is financed through a bank loan rather than mobilizing your own cash (amortization over 3 years). This should be accompanied by a business plan and quanti-qualitative objectives.
The website integrates into a global digital ecosystem and obviously echoes a company strategy. However, if we have to specify an approximate budget for the Magento website, it is advisable to budget between €50K and €100K for a serious project.
article author
Published in June 2018 (updated 2022)
Lead Developer and Technical Architect at Gardeners.