Having an eCommerce site of your own can provide two key benefits.
The first is the ability to control the look of the site and the presentation of your products. On your own site you can put your product in its best light. This increases the average amount you can sell your product for and keep customers looking at your product instead of wandering off to look at other people’s products.
The second benefit is that the cost of individual transactions can be lower especially at high volumes or for higher cost items. On your own site you do not have to pay listing fees, although you still have credit card processing cost. You might even be able to charge listing fees to other people, or sell advertising space.
With the huge benefits of having your own site you might wonder, as I did at one time, why everyone does not have their own eCommerce site.
The reason, I discovered, is that most designers charge a minimum of $5,000 per site for a basic site. Then some of the cheapest eCommerce software (that works) costs $55 per month just for the license. (Lower cost/free licenses require extra help from a developer – that could run a few hundred per month!)
Compared to the listing fees and other costs of doing business on eBay, Etsy, or other online retail sites, $5000-$10,000 one time and $50-$300 per month is a great deal if your sales volume is high enough, but a lot of people are not even making $5,000 per year online.
So one reason most people do not have there own eCommerce site is because they cannot afford the initial cost.
We at Kdari are committed to getting businesses started. We believe that small businesses are a huge part of what made America great and huge part of keeping the economy moving. We have dedicated ourselves to whatever it takes to start more small businesses.
In this case, that means finding a way to make customized shopping carts a little more affordable. We really wish we could give these away for $500 each. Believe me, we tried. The best we can do right now is $3,240 for a basic site and $15/mo. Or, you can lower your upfront cost significantly by selecting a higher monthly payment.
That is still a lot less than any other “working” option you are going to find. How do we know? Well, we tried to outsource this part of the business. We discovered that we could do better than any of the options we were researching if we did it ourselves.