Blogs - The E-commerce blog

Joomla e-commerce: a client guide to saving money

Written by Marco Conti Friday, 05 June 2009 00:00

Joomla is a great option for an online e-commerce store.

Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) meaning that its job is to allow a website owner to manage their website content without having to know HTML or any type of coding (although some basic html/css and graphic skills don't hurt).

Joomla is also "extensible", meaning that just like on your computer, you can install software in it that will give Joomla additional capabilities, such as allowing your web site to have a full featured shopping cart.Joomla's most popular shopping cart is called "Virtuemart" and like Joomla itself, it is free to download and use.

The great thing about Virtuemart is that managing the store's products is as easy as managing Joomla's own content. In fact, creating and/or editing a Joomla article is very similar to sending an email. Creating a Virtuemart product is also similar to working with Joomla's content and uses an almost identical process.

Yes, this Joomla thing sounds great, but what does it cost?

Like in everything else, there are different price points. Then final development cost depends on many factors but in general a full web store built on Joomla/Virtuemart (or any other script for that matter) ranges from as low as $1200 to upwards of $5,000 and even as high as $20,000. However, the average store we build here at ContiCreative.com usually runs around the $2,500 to $3,500 mark. Interestingly, one of the major cost factor in any website built, and more so in e-commerce, is how well prepared, organized and how clear the "vision" of the client is.

It's certainly possible to pay less if you shop around, but bids lower than $1000 usually mean that the web designer is either inexperienced, naive or dishonest. Many companies "hook" their clients with bids as low as $400 for a full e-commerce store, only to increase the price in mid development when the client no longer feels he or she has a choice or doesn't want to lose the initial investment.

Some web designers simply are not very good at what they do and charge less in order to gain experience. There is nothing wrong with that and everyone in the business has done it at one time or another, but the chances that the final product will not work as intended or that it's going to need a more professional intervention later on are greatly increased.

A large part of our business is rescuing such projects from oblivion.
We constantly get clients that have gone through three or four $500 projects already and still don't have a working store. By the time they come to us they have often spent more than if they hired us from the beginning.

But I can have it fixed later, right?

Sure, but a poorly made store is not only a waste of money in the short term, it can actually have a negative impact on the store's reputation and result in unquantifiable loss of revenue for months or even years afterwords. A store that doesn't work or it's hard to use will quickly build a bad reputation that will haunt it even after any problems with it have been corrected. It certainly is going to lose the initial customers (and their friends, friends of friends and so on).

For that reason, and because we are a small business too, we have several payment plans to assure that our clients can afford to do things right the very first time around. Depending on the cost of the store, we can set up interest free monthly payments as low as a $150 a month. In fact, we usually turn down jobs where the client's budget is clearly too small for what he or she wants to accomplish. We dislike being set for failure but we equally dislike seeing our clients fail.

Our philosophy is to do our best on every job and we refuse to cut any corners that may affect the success of our client's store. We rather get paid slowly than deliver a sub par product.

Online commerce is already a difficult business to be in, with as many, if not more, variables as regular brick and mortar store.
Compared to their real world counterparts, online stores are a bargain and for that reason we believe it's silly to limit the store's chances at success by saving a few dollars on hosting, proper security, poor coding or below par design.

Often the difference between a well made store and a badly made one is in the order of $500 to a $1000. In real world terms, compared to the cost of a regular retail store, that kind of money is almost irrelevant. Just changing a real store's door locks can easily cost as much.
Here is an even better analogy: depending on what your store sells it will take often less than a week worth of lost sales to offset any real or perceived saving gained by cutting corners or using an inexperienced web developer.

And, as mentioned above, that week of lost sales will probably be a continuing liability and turn those 'savings" into an outright loss.

Where the savings really are

One thing I want to make clear is that I am not advising you to throw your money to the wind. In fact, I pride myself of the fact that I often go out of my way to save money for my clients.

My entire web design philosophy is based on empowering the client to manage their own web sites and e-commerce store "in house". That's why I always include a generous amount of training time in every web site build.

This goes against the traditional model of web design, where the initial web site cost is actually secondary to the continuing revenue generated by maintenance and edits. Many web designer count on the fact that their clients are unable to make even the smallest edit to their web site and their entire business model is based on monthly :"maintenance fees".

At ContiCreative we believe in making our clients as independent as possible. We don't think our clients should be cows we milk every morning.We believe they are partners in our business as we are partners in theirs.

Even when clients request we maintain their sites for them (either because they think they are not technically proficient enough or because they don't have enough time), we try to find them less expensive help to take care of the site's basic maintenance or data entry.

We believe that anyone can learn to use our websites, but if a client doesn't wish to invest the time or effort, there is no point in making them pay our rates when the job can be done for less than $15 an hour by a moderately proficient assistant.

This approach can save our client far more than they would if we shaved a few hundred dollars from the initial development cost and it allows us to build the site right from the beginning.

Conclusion:

There are a few ways to save money and still build the best shop you can afford:

Make a business plan. Business on the Web is no different from real life.
Do your research, read user forums, blogs, etc.
Hire an experienced professional.
Do your homework.
Come prepared to the site build meeting with a clear plan
Always have a "plan B". There are often several ways to accomplish the same thing.
Don't be fooled by false savings.
Remember: you are building a web site for your customers, not for yourself or your spouse, uncle or friends.
Save money where appropriate.
Don't skimp on hosting. The price difference between a good host and a bad one is no more than the cost of a Frappuccino per month.
Prepare and organize your products with good photos, descriptions, prices, weight, dimensions and so on. Use a spreadsheet program like Excel to organize them.
Have a clear idea of the shipping methods you want to use
Focus more on the way your site works, make sure your site looks good AFTER you make sure it works.

These are just some of the tricks that will make your site work well and keep it affordable. Above all, hire a good professional to help you though this journey. There are many talented web designers out there, make sure you hire one of them.

If you have any comment or questions, please do contact us and let us know how we can help. And stay tuned for more e-commerce articles and tutorial in the near future.

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I am not sure I understand the "Other site"

I apologize, but I am a bit baffled by the "other site" comment. Maybe I am not yet awake

Please feel free to contact Conticreative and I'll be happy to help.

Marco MC Conti , August 02, 2009 | url

...

I'm not sure how to use the other site, and I didn't find it as helpful as I had hoped. Is there any other sites out there that can help with switching between shopping carts? Seiko Watches

Sylvia Smith , August 02, 2009 | url

Good job

Sometimes all that business owner can afford is free e-commerce platform. Virtuemart is one of good examples of such shopping cart. It's easy to install and use. In case you need to switch from othe shopping cart - it's not a problem either. You can try web service cart2cart to move all your data automatically. Check the details at www.shopping-cart-migration.com

Lesya , July 23, 2009