How much cost for a Magento Ecommerce site

MAgento is one of the industry leading open source Ecommerce engines. Magento has taken over where Oscommerce left off, and contains every single feature required by an Ecommerce site. When people ask me how to make an Ecommerce site quickly and easily, I always point them at Magento as a good place to start.

Like an Ecommerce site software, Magento will work pretty much out of the box, but it will not look very nice. You still need a web developer who is versed in skills like HTML and CSS. You also need a designer. The designer makes up the graphics for the site - literally how it is going to appear - including graphics and images that reflect your brand etc. It is the job of the web developer to take this design and "skin" the default Magento site with these graphics.

This job can take as long as you like. It is possible to go out and buy a complete Magento template, ready made, and copy it onto your site, or you can have the site designed from the ground up. Depending on how complicated the design is, it might take a developer several days to complete this skinning process. A very simple design can be implemented in a matter of hours - I know - I've done it.

I've taken a simple design in a photoshop file, installed Magento on my server and skinned the site in the course of one long evening. I'm no expert in these matters either, so others could do this more quickly.

It is important to work to a budget. If you want a fantastically complicated site which takes days to design and weeks to implement, then you are going to get a very large bill. However, if you plump for a fairly simple design, you web developer shouldn't be charging you more than one day for his efforts.

Coming to the point, if a web developer is charging you more than £500 to skin a design onto a simple Magento site, then something is probably wrong!

Magento is a cheap and easy way to get quickly into Ecommerce - but the job of the web developer is finished when the design is implemented. Then the hard work starts. As the retailer you will have to invest considerable time and effort into setting up the site, products etc so that customers have got something to buy.

You also need somebody skilled at optimising your site for search engines and marketing the website. If you aren't technical then you will be paying somebody each month to help you tasks like managing CPC advertising campaigns and doing email marketing. These costs all add up!

And finally don't let anybody lead you into having an OSCommerce website. OSCommerce was a brilliant product back in the day, but Magento is now several orders of magnitude better - OSCommerce is an old product which should be retired.