Hi every one,
I am about to start my online business and would like to know what is the approximative cost of starting that would include:
Shopify online store and other service
Niche exploration provider’s app (suppliers, products,)
Payment service providers (credit card merchants, paypal…)
others mandatory services?
Can somebody feed us with this information?
With thanks.
Hi @msaci
This is a great question to ask. Understanding your overhead costs are going to allow you to set better pricing margins and budget in your first few months.
Are you dropshipping your products, or are you selling inventory that you store yourself? The costs for those two different types of businesses are a bit different. But in general, these are some of the standard fees you might see when starting an online store.
Please note: These are average prices, each fee I note could be different and could also change at any time. This is just to provide a general outline of the fees you can expect.
Shopify Subscription: Shopify Basic plan is $29 USD a month and where most merchants start.
Custom domain: Averages $14 a year, but can go anywhere from $1 - $100s of dollars.
Theme file: Free or premium (average $150-$300 USD for life).
Product sourcing/dropshipping apps: Either they are free to use, but have slightly higher product prices for dropshipping or print on demand or they average $20-$30 USD a month. Some of the most popular ones in our App store currently:
Marketing: This is a tough one. Different platforms can cost widely different. If you are advertising on Facebook you might be spending $20 a month on advertising where as Google might be $200 a month. The general recommendation for your marketing fees is that you should be paying around 2%-5% of your annual revenue on marketing.
Payment Gateway: Most payment gateways will not charge you an upfront fee to use their services, but will instead charge a processing fee on any payments they process. For example, our gateway Shopify Payments on the Shopify Basic plan charges this much per transaction processed: 2.9% + 30c USD. You can find the detailed breakdown on this in our pricing page I linked above.
You can learn more about understanding start up costs in our Blog as well. We have a great breakdown of the costs to consider and what an average small business spends per year on fees. Each business is unique though so take these price quotes with a grain of salt!
Research: What Does It Really Cost to Start a Business? (2021) - Shopify Canada
If you have any additional questions don’t hesitate to reply back and let me know.
This really depends on what you need, I integrated our sql based previous site, with 10K lines and 60 K customers. Many inventory apps mucked up our database so I removed them and made lots of things simple.
Also depend on if you ship or do you have stock locations etc.
We only have the 79 euro shopify package which is enough for us.
I built in orderly print to follow our backorders, (free then there is a smaller fee)
Auto purchase orders to order from suppliers, (free then there is a smaller fee)
Our main stock is kept in shopify and feeds to quickbooks, quickbooks is 36£
Dpd app, which is free, or there is a small fee, but after a while if you ship more you will need to pay a little more. For us it was not beneficial yet to pay a lot for shipping providers, as we have extremely great fees from couriers. We also connected Royal Mail, so with few clicks we can create labels.
We also moved away from Mailchimp and using the shopify email for marketing saving few hundreds on this each month.
We firstly used shopify payments, but they are painfully slow! Then we are now using sagely and elavon so we get all card payments next morning by 9am. However ! this is really expensive as Shopify chucks another 1% card fee, so we are not very happy about this.
I really struggled getting help from the forum when tried to build in apps, nobody was helpful and spent endless nights to find the best option.
For inventory you have to pay a lot and you have to be careful as many app owners have no clue and they can ruin your data!
We pay in total for these 500£ roundly each months, we have 100 order per day roughly and ship worldwide with 200 K stock and 1M turnover.
Good luck, you can save money on lots of apps and have a great store.
Thank you for your input, much appreciated, good luck in your business.