Should a buy a magento template?

You can buy a great Magento theme for under $100.

What are the other 'touches" that add up to $4800?

I agree with kjamesnv. If I go with Magento (I am debating between it and Shopify) the theme I selected is $180.00 and its $129 for Shopify. Go figure. Most themes are cheaper. And if you are willing to risk an outsourced developer group I can do an intro for you in India, these are the guys that will do the integration for me and it should be cheaper than what was quoted for you. BTW the price usually depends on how complex and how many modules you need. At least that's what this guy told me.

On the other hand you can always check pricing on elance. Ask the devs to look at your current site and ask them to quote.

Hey buddy,

You can run a profitable business under $500. The quote is too high or you have done a typ error.

Check out shopperpress. It is a good theme.

Andy

Why you want to switch on magento ? I have used magento and bigcommerce both and would say bigcommerce is far better than magento and now both of my sites are on bigcommerce - PM me if you need any help

Our advice is to go with Magento. We have had bigcommerce for a few years and are changing soon.
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few reasons all regarding capabilities..

-main reason is accounting.. I need to integrate my site into quick books and so far the only plugin I have seen for bigcommerce (webgility) seems to have bad reviews.

-I would like to do dynamic retargeting

-magento seems like it is more scaleable. I will admit that I may be naive in saying that.

Magento is a great platform but not for the faint-hearted. There are plenty of great themes on Themeforest but from experience opt for one that is well supported by the theme's developers, as you'll invariably encounter problems which a good developer should be able to help with. Themeforest will allow you to sort themes per sales or rating to help you narrow down your search.

Magento is number one. Its just a better system overall, you can nit-pick any of them but Magento is the most recommended platform.

Magento is far more complex and flexible than Bigcommerce.

In our experience you can hire just about any decent web developer to manage the backend templates and customise a Bigcommerce store. It's a simple exercise. Any web developer with good HTML/CSS skills can do it, and this gives you some cost advantages with ongoing development.

Magento, however, requires someone with more experience. The template system is far more complex. You will need to have an ongoing relationship with a good Magento developer for future customisations. The rate will be around $40 to $120 per hour, depending on where you are in the world.

$4800 is about right for a new Magento design and integration, if they are an experienced Magento developer.

Check their portfolio and make sure they are primarily focused on it as their platform of choice. They should have at least 2 or 3 Magento jobs going each month for a team of 5 to 10 people. This will give you an idea as to whether they are experts with Magento and able to support you in the future.

I would also suggest that you ring past customers and check that they completed the project on time, fixed bugs and provided support at a good ongoing rate. Make sure you have a good SLA (service level agreement) in place.

Many web developers will quote a 'cheap' upfront cost to get you in the door and then hit you with a higher ongoing development cost. So, just make sure you check that with their past customers.

Personally, I wouldn't touch a $100 template with a barge pole. It will look like rubbish. The majority of template designers, who are selling at $100, have never actually run an eCommerce store and therefore don't really understand the finer points of trust and branding. (Not sure if this matters for your product however!)

Go with Magento if you have at least $1,000/month to spend on ongoing maintenance and a good server. This is a drop in the ocean if your store is already doing well on Bigcommerce.

Onwards,
Katrina

Yes, offcourse. You should buy a magneto template. I can help you to increase your business growth.

Custom themes only become realisted when you are makeing $1mil revenue of more. Use Themeforest high sales themes - now Magento is more fully featured but more complex to run day to day. In the end you need to keep it as clean as possible - limited number of extensions and little custom code - otherwise you will end up playing with technology and not running the business.

Most providers will quote $4-5,000, take a month or two, and you will have medium to long term problems. Keep it simple, keep it clean, and you will have a platform to grow.

Magento templates are great, not having to pay monthly for an all-in-one ecommerce solution is probably my favorite thing about using magento for my sites.

You've probably already learned this through your own experience and research, but I feel like it's worth mentioning that Bigcommerce is reputed to be MUCH easier to deal with and manage than Magento.

Of course, it's more than likely that you're wanting to make your switch because you're ready to scale up -- in which case, Magento is probably the correct call!

If you don't mind my asking, is there a certain feature or set of features that you're looking for that's necessitating your switch?

Hope this helps!

_ Sean B.

If you find it worth buying then you should buy it.

I'm researching the same thing. I sell a product with a lot of variation. 5 different drop downs of options per product. I did a Shopify Trial, but their system couldn't handle the variation.

As we've already answered before, it's as simple as this, yes Magento CE is a good choice and the top small business platform, you choose a high sales Themeforest theme. You need good hosting, the simplest is AWS with HHVM (designed by Facebook for PHP performance) - you can run dual clusters like corporate companies on $50-100/mth hosting with 1-2s performance (no full page cache), Google loves clusters, and you can generally self-manage as the install is incredibly simple. The key is that you need 'clean' installs - no adding extensions, custom code, etc.

We used something called HEIC (High Efficiency Instant Commerce) for Magento CE derived from enterprise methods to install this for a company but we stopped doing small business work - takes a day or two to have the whole thing running and will beat 95% of small business installs using Magento's maximum 200% efficiency.

The problem most small business has is that the service providers (to charge time) and the retailers (to think they have an edge) change the base installs - this reduces efficiency and most small business even running on CE only get ~50% efficiency - which is close to niche. Corporates use the less is more approach - it's why Amazon, Google, Facebook all have 1,000%+ efficiency and $1mil revenue per employee.

The service providers and moderators on various forums (who are also service providers) are desperate to not let this information enter the public domain - search Magento StackExchange for HHVM - you will find 3 posts. It means a retailer can run a site themselves, virtually no service provider install or dev costs, and hosting performance that providers sell for 5-10x the price of using AWS with HHVM (you get free 12mths for small instances on AWS).

You can search for one of our posts here 'big websites' and look at comment #26 - it shows you a clean install approach for Magento CE.

The ultimate benefit is that Google and customers start coming to you, no need to spend hours with SEO or PPC, you can run with the most incredibly low costs, have enterprise grade performance on ridiculously small hardware, and self-manage 80%+ of the install.