Why E-Commerce Web Design Matters
E-Commerce web design plays a critical role in the success of any online business. A well-designed site not only showcases products effectively but also builds trust, guides user behavior, and enhances the overall shopping experience. From intuitive navigation and fast load times to mobile responsiveness and secure checkout processes, every design element impacts conversion rates. In a highly competitive digital marketplace, professional and easy-to-use web design can be the difference between a one-time visitor and a loyal customer.
How do I sell products & services online?
There are many different ways to implement e-commerce solutions on web sites. IDP offers three options for ECommerce software- BigCommerce, Magento, and WordPress WooCommerce. Magento and WooCommerce options are both open source solutions. The software is free to use. The cost is in the hours to build the site and any modules that need to be added to the project. BigCommerce is a paid hosted software solution.
We also work on custom E-Commerce web development projects. But most of our shopping websites run on BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce.
WordPress WooCommerce Web Development
IDP also develops a lot of WordPress E-Commerce websites. Magento can be overly complicated and it is designed for online shops with thousands of products SKUs. A WordPress WooCommerce store is a great option for a retailer with a smaller number of product SKUs. We recommend WooCommerce for WordPress as the shopping cart. There are lots of available shopping carts for WordPress. WooCommerce is one of the most popular and we have a lot of experience developing WooCommerce websites. WordPress E-Commerce projects are usually cheaper than Magento because it takes less time to build and it is not as complicated. Our average WooCommerce projects cost anywhere from $5,000 – $10,000 range. WooCommerce works great and IDP has developed many WordPress ecommerce sites running on WooCommerce.
BigCommerce Development
IDP is a certified BigCommerce Developer. BigCommerce is our enterprise level E-Commerce solution. BigCommerce is a great solution for a big E-Commerce store once it has outgrown WordPress or Magento. The BigCommerce software is a paid solution and the software is very robust and bug free. Professional BigCommerce websites perform at a high level and can scale to meet the needs of your E-Commerce store. It is similar to Shopify and Shopify is their main competitor. We evaluated both Shopify and BigCommerce in order to decide which software solution to offer to our clients. We chose BigCommerce over Shopify because we believe it is the better E-Commerce software package. With BigCommerce we can still be programmers and meet the needs of the client.
Magento E-Commerce Web Development
We develop ecommerce web sites using Magento e-commerce software. There are a ton of shopping cart software packages available. We specialize in Magento so that we can build e-commerce web sites quickly without having to learn new software architecture. Magento software is open source free software. IDP charges for installation and integration of the software, building a custom Magento skin, customizing the Magento templates, integrating merchant accounts and shipping, importing products and Magento hosting. Costs vary depending on the project. Most of our Magento e-commerce web sites cost between $5,000-$15,000. It is a wide range because Magento e-commerce projects are vastly different depending on the product data requirements, shipping requirements and other customization requirements. Basically, the more complicated your products are the more expensive it is to get them into Magento properly.
The Magento shopping cart works with a MySQL database where you store your products, prices, catalog images, and customer data. An administrator CMS is included that you can log into and upload data into the database. The admin CMS is web based and can be accessed from any networked computer. You do not have to install software locally to administer the site. The software includes complete content management and product management by the client. You can login to the Magento control panel to manage the entire online store. You can read more about some of our Magento ECommerce websites on our blog.
Ready to Utilize E-Commerce Design to Promote Online Sales?
Custom Programming for E-Commerce Solutions
Many businesses prefer custom shopping cart solutions because they have very specific specifications for their e-commerce web site. Sometimes the design requirements require a custom solution. The products might not “fit” within the traditional shopping cart model, or the calculations that need to take place on the ordering page are too complex for pre-made software. The advantage of building a custom shopping cart is that you can tell us exactly how you want it to work and we will program it to your specifications. Sometimes a custom solution makes sense when you just need a small shopping cart added to an existing web site and you don’t need all of the functionality included with shopping cart software systems. We have developed many different small custom e-commerce systems for clients over the years so we understand the requirments.
Prices for custom e-commerce solutions vary depending on the project. Generally speaking a custom ecommerce shopping cart application would cost 2-3 times more than a Magento or WordPress site.