Magento ecommerce pricing can be somewhat of a mystery. This is because there are a variety of factors to consider when you’re looking to set up an ecommerce site with Magento.
From plan costs, to developer costs, hosting and extension costs to name a few; we’re going to be looking at the price of a Magento site and whether or not you need the full feature list for your ecommerce site or not.
But let’s start out with looking into the 2 different editions of Magento and what type of businesses they’re best suited to.
Magento open source edition pricing
Magento open source, formally known as Magento community edition is completely free to download and install. This edition delivers basic ecommerce capabilities which allow you to build an online shop.
Magento open source includes:
- Integrated checkout, payment and shipping
- Mobile optimised shopping
- Catalog management
- Extended functionality via App Marketplace
- Instant purchase
- Site search
This edition sounds great on the surface being a free download but it isn’t as simple as downloading and installing Magento open source software. There are costs associated with this edition too that we’ll look into later on.
Magento commerce edition pricing
Magento commerce edition is their paid edition. Prices can vary anywhere from $20,000 per year up to around $100,000. Their pricing is also based on an annual Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and Average Order Value (AOV).
This means that the more gross sales you’re making per year and the higher your Average Order Value is, the chance is that the higher your costs will be.
Magento commerce includes:
- Magento commerce application
- Core application support
- Business intelligence Pro
- B2B functionality
- Single-tenant, dedicated infrastructure
- Managed cloud services
- Deployment tools
- Larger dedicated staging environment
- Faster support response time
- Increased customisation available
- 50 GB of testing
- Disaster recovery and data retention
- Varnish-based CDN
- Image optimisation
- DDoS protection and WAF
- Performance monitoring tools
- Infrastructure support
- Technical account manager
- High availability architecture
- Automated data backup
- Expansive monitoring and alerting
- Scale globally on AWS and Azure clouds
The true cost of Magento ecommerce edition will heavily depend on the needs of your business as well as other things such as development costs, support costs and more – but we’ll go into more detail on these later on.
Magento developer costs
One of the biggest costs associated with a Magento ecommerce site is the development costs. There are a few options to choose from though and we’ll go through them in more detail here.
The reason developer costs are a must have when developing a Magento site is because it requires a high level of technical and coding knowledge. A Magento developer will work to build, support and improve a Magento website. Mostly designing and building Magento websites may take more than a one person team to fulfil all the skills required.
There are also two different types of Magento Developer; a front end developer who will focus on building your theme, ensuring it looks great and is responsive – and a backend developer who focuses on building the features of your website such as existing Magento extensions or bespoke code.
There are two ways you can go about hiring a Magento Developer for your site.
- Hire a freelancer
- Employ a full time team member
Hiring a full time developer
It can be a big jump to hire a full time developer for your team – especially when you haven’t even launched your site yet.
The rate of pay for a full time Magento developer can depend on both their knowledge and experience. According to Indeed, a Magento Developer in the UK’s average base salary is around £40,000 per year. Of course, this cost can increase depending on location as well as London salaries are expected to be around £50,000 per year.
But there are benefits to hiring a full time developer:
- They will become a valuable member of the team
- They will quickly learn your business and seek ways to improve it
- Their knowledge is invaluable
- A full time member is able to dedicate more to the business
There are definitely a lot of positives when it comes to hiring a full time Magento Developer but if you’re not ready to take on a member of staff, hiring a freelance developer might be the right option for you.
Hiring a freelance developer
There are also many benefits to hiring a freelance developer and the monetary commitment may seem lower initially. A freelance developer you would hire on a project by project basis for a set amount of money. Sometimes this can end up costing more due to freelancers not having the same benefits as a full time employee (pension, holidays etc).
The cost of hiring a freelancer can range anywhere from $50 to $250 per hour – it simply depends on their knowledge, experience and also how much their market values them at.
Here are some benefits of hiring a freelancer:
- Some may charge less than an agency due to reduced overheads
- Can be hired on a project by project basis
- Can hire from across the world and benefit from currency fluctuations
- More likely to go above and beyond otherwise they won’t receive repeat business from you
Both options are good options but choosing which would be better for your business entirely depends on your budgets and expectations.
Magento web agency costs
The other option is to hire a Magento web agency. This is an agency who hire Magento developers, both front and back end, who then work on your Magento ecommerce website as their client.
The cost for hiring an agency will vary from agency to agency as well as place to place. There are thousands of Magento web agencies out there and they usually charge around $50 to $100 per hour for building a Magento ecommerce website. But this comes with a team of developers rather than just one or two.
When hiring a web agency, you will need to decide if you want to work with someone local to you or take advantage of cheaper labor by working with a foreign agency. Whilst cheaper, communication and expectations can be misunderstood, which will impact the timeline of your project.
There isn’t really a wrong answer when it comes to finding a Magento Developer – just make sure that they fully understand your business requirements, their pay fits into your budget and you can build a strong relationship with them
Magento theme costs
Themes are also another cost to take into consideration when looking at a Magento site. Magento themes that are prebuilt on the Magento Marketplace cost anywhere between $0 and $200+. Starting out with one of their base themes isn’t a bad place to start – particularly if you’re tight on cash.
If you choose to hire a developer to help you out, they can take the base theme and customise it from there to fit your business needs and branding. Of course keep in mind the additional costs this incurs.
Your other option is to build your own theme from scratch. If you’ve chosen to hire a front and back end developer, you can set out your requirements, functionality and wants for your website and they can then create your Magento website from there.
Remember you will need to provide a very detailed brief in order to get exactly what you want. You could also consider consulting a UX Designer to create the look, functionality and feel of your website, before your developers get to work.
Magento extensions
Magento extensions are stand alone modules that you can add to your Magento site to extend the functionality. These extensions range from being free to costing upwards of $500.
Before adding any extensions to your Magento website you should consult with your developers to verify the extensions compatibility and possible conflicts with other extensions. This is because there is always a chance that a conflict could cause multiple errors and impact your site.
As with themes, you don’t have to use the extensions provided and can create your own from scratch. Again this involves an increased cost from hiring developers. This is the beauty of using Magento – the complete control and customisation, but it does come at a cost.
Domain costs
Your domain cost is also something to take into consideration. Whilst a fraction of the cost of getting a Magento site developed you should look around for the best deal possible for your preferred domain.
Domains generally cost anywhere from £10 to £100 per year and some ecommerce platforms offer you a free domain for the first year – just like we do here at EKM.
Remember your domain name should be an exact to your business name for a variety of reasons including, making it easy to find you online as well as branded SEO benefits.
Hosting costs
Hosting however, is where your costs can increase. You will need to look for a separate hosting solution that works well with Magento. There are many hosting companies on the market that solely work with Magento sites and understand the requirements needed.
The cost of unmanaged hosting can start from $10 and reach up to $250 per month, whereas the cost of managed hosting starts at around $190 per month. Magento Commerce hosting however, starts from $500 per month for dedicated servers.
Comparing Magento pricing options
When looking at Magento ecommerce pricing options, it’s difficult to directly compare both options as the costs associated with them vary wildly.
Magento open source is a good option for businesses with a set budget, but there are more costs associated with using this edition. Whereas there are other options on the ecommerce market, such as EKM, that would end up costing you significantly less due to the development and support costs, to mention a few.
Whereas with Magento commerce, while you do get a huge amount of features, customisation and freedom, the costs and technical knowledge needed to create an ecommerce site are high.
Do you need all of Magento’s features for your business?
The ultimate question is though – do you need all of Magento’s features in order for your business to be successful?
No.
You can choose similar options on the marketing, but on a SaaS (Software as a Service) based platform – just like EKM. With EKM, things like your hosting, development costs, features, add-ons and more are all included in the cost of the plan.
Check out our plans and see if we can help your business become a success!
Learn more about our ecommerce plans and get started with a free 14-day trial here.
