In today’s business landscape, having an online store has become essential for all types of businesses, ranging from small enterprises to large corporations. Choosing the right platform is crucial in this process, and PrestaShop stands out as one of the best alternatives in the market due to its flexibility and customization potential.
However, a decisive factor is the cost of creating an online store on PrestaShop when it comes to hiring it. This aspect not only influences the decision on the features and functionalities the online store will have but also impacts its potential future success.
Indeed, the price can vary significantly for various reasons and factors such as design, necessary modules, specific functionalities requiring development, or even digital marketing.
Therefore, in this post, we will delve into the importance of pricing and budget when hiring PrestaShop online store design services, offered by expert agencies like ours, IDX Innovadeluxe. Let’s get into it!
Table of contents
Factors Affecting the Budget of a PrestaShop Store
I want to begin by discussing the factors that influence the budget of a PrestaShop store. This way, we can understand which needs are crucial when defining your budget.
Let’s explore fundamental factors that will be present in your project, excluding any unique requirements you might have:
Design and Customization
The choice of design type is a key factor to consider. The selection and customization of the chosen template are crucial. The more customization, the higher the price of the PrestaShop online store. You can either work on a custom design by a designer for a fully tailored store or start with a catalog template that can be personalized to appear distinct.
Both options are valid for having a quality store, but the former involves higher costs for the project, as the agency needs to dedicate more working hours. Additionally, templates must be adapted to your corporate image, impacting sales, ecommerce KPIs like conversion rate, and average cart value. Therefore, I would recommend customizing the design for optimization of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) if not initially, at least as necessary.
Functionalities and Necessary Modules
Any extra functionality you want to add to PrestaShop will be done through modules. We have an extensive catalog of modules addressing a wide range of needs we’ve encountered over the 15+ years of designing and developing PrestaShop online stores.
For example, if you need a module to customize the checkout process of your online store, you will need to purchase and configure the module. Alternatively, if you want to encourage impulse purchases, modules facilitating this can be chosen.
Product Catalog
Another aspect to consider when requesting a proposal from an agency is who will be responsible for creating the products in your online store. If you ask the agency to do it, you’ll need to hire a product import service. You’ll also need to prepare the catalog in an Excel file for them to import.
If you are migrating from another system like Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, or similar, you’ll likely want to retain all your customer data, orders, and catalog. Therefore, you’ll need to migrate all that data to the new store. This task is complicated and, therefore, more costly than just importing products. Consider this when requesting a budget.
Web Hosting
To get your store up and running, you’ll need to hire a server to host it so that your customers can make purchases. There are different options available, such as shared hosting, VPS server, dedicated server, or Cloud server. Cloud servers are the most recommended option for quality, and the hosting industry tends to phase out other types to focus on Cloud. Keep this in mind when requesting a proposal for your store.
Digital Marketing: The Key to Your Online Store’s Success
Believe me when I say that the difference between an online store and a successful one lies in implementing Digital Marketing strategies. It’s well-known that the online channel has been a significant source of income for businesses for years, being the primary one for many.
Therefore, consider in your online store’s price that you’ll need to carry out Marketing actions such as SEO optimization, Google advertising campaigns, or even Email Marketing.
SEO for PrestaShop
Optimizing your online store to rank on Google is crucial. Throughout the life of an ecommerce project, organic traffic becomes the primary source. Especially for new online stores, it’s important that an expert SEO consultant develops an SEO strategy reflecting your project’s short, medium, and long-term needs in terms of the three SEO pillars: technical SEO, content, and Link Building.
This will determine the steps to follow both in the creation of your online store, identifying optimizable technical factors of the chosen template before indexing, and in the following months with, for example, a healthy Link Building strategy, a blog content strategy, or optimizing category and product content based on the right keywords to maximize revenue.
Performing SEO for PrestaShop is a must in the budget for your PrestaShop store.
Google Ads Advertising
Google Ads is another fundamental channel to maximize your online store’s investment. Like SEO, Google Ads is a traffic acquisition channel through Google. The main difference is that Google Ads relies on creating ads and bidding on keywords, which are not necessary to pay for in SEO.
For starting online activity, it’s recommended to create campaigns in Google Ads, such as Google Shopping, to attract qualified traffic to transactional URLs like products.
Running Google Ads in your PrestaShop store will require a monthly investment for both advertising campaigns and the agency to manage them, thus increasing the price of your PrestaShop store both at the beginning and month-to-month.
However, running advertising campaigns is almost essential to maximize the online store’s investment in the short and medium term, so I encourage you to consider it in all cases.
Email Marketing
Lastly, having talked about acquisition channels, I also want to address retention channels. It’s well-known that it’s harder to acquire a customer than to retain them. Therefore, applying effective Email Marketing strategies in your PrestaShop store will help turn customers acquired through SEO or Google Ads into recurring customers.
In fact, just like organic traffic from the SEO strategy has the highest conversion rate and average cart value in acquisition channels, Email Marketing is undoubtedly the winner in this aspect among channels aimed at retention.
Therefore, for your PrestaShop store budget, consider the setup and strategy of Email Marketing campaigns, having both recurring promotional campaigns and automation rules for cart recovery or making your customers recurring.
Conclusion
In summary, we’ve covered fundamental factors that will affect the price of your online store, such as design and customization, modules, or custom developments. In addition, Digital Marketing strategies such as SEO, Google Ads, or Email Marketing are essential, requiring an initial investment for configuration and optimization.
For this, it is essential to have a professional Ecommerce service provider that ensures the cost of creating your PrestaShop store is optimally suited to both quality and your expectations.
Would you like IDX Innovadeluxe to take care of it? If so, we would be delighted to carry out your project.
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