Shopping Cart Software Pricing

How much should one be ready to pay?

[Morgenhund]

Hello,

how much should an established business be ready to pay for a full-blown shopping cart software, deeply customized for a specific market/industry needs?

How much have you paid?

[lorax]

It really depends upon how far away from an off the shelf product you want to stray. Most OTS products can function fine. But then you'll want your own design ($$) but if you want the site SEO'd you'll need to decide on automated SEO (plugins for the cart) or manual SEO (you or your staff need to fill in the data) in either case - additional coding ($$) and so on for each additional item that's not included with the base catalog/cart.

On the cheap - plan for about $5k USD unless you do all of the coding. A robust, small shop size, ecommerce venture (not an Amazon but with some of the features of the carts used by the big shops) plan for $50K USD and up.

The better way to approach this, especially if this is your first foray into Ecommerce is to start with a solid, well built, indexable/SEO'd catalog that fits your budget, get's you in the game, and allows you to learn and figure out what you want in the next generation - plan a review and upgrade at about a year out. No one can determine or foresee all of the items they'll want or need a year from now. I recommend my clients pick a good starting point and go with that for a while then review and upgrade after many months or even a year of using it.