How much for a kick-ass Bigcommerce or 3dcart site?

Honestly, they are on the same level so you are replacing like for like - more or less. We have tried advising people what is happening but there appears to be a consensus that it is business as usual - a new recession is coming next year. Depressing, yes, but at least you can get off the tracks before the train comes - least worst result.

From a cost point of view the standard IT budget is 5% of revenue, of which consulting is 35% of that, hosting 20% and platform 10-20%. The truth is that it should take days to implement and be running - you do not need anything fancy - it just needs to look professional and trustworthy. Most will quote weeks to months adding extra code to justify chargeable time – medium to long term it causes serious problems.

Basically you can buy an off the shelf theme, find yourself some decent Tier 3/4 or 5/6 hosting and launch – reality is that a service provider should be charging high $100s for it – but you can normally double that for chargeable time justification. The thing with the platforms you’re quoting is they have an upper limit of organic at around $50,000 revenue per year, after that it is your hard work and time. Magento is better for growth but it is harder to implement – this should take weeks and be as minimal as possible.

Conversions are averaging 2.5% across the board however SMEs are running 5-10x less efficient so conversions can easily be 0.5% and be normal - obviously it depends on sector. The best is to take the largest corporate in your market – find their conversions – and reduce by 5-10x. The quick solution is ad-remarking for conversions – it was designed specifically for the task – then you get in to things like payment gateways, shipping costs, pricing, however these are qualitative so you will spend 3-6mths trying to figure it out. If ad-remarketing does not double your conversions within 2-3wks then you have a fundamental business issue – often due to pricing and/or trust.

The real problem you have is this, you want to generate growth in a downturn environment. In most situations the best case advice will keep stability (until next year) – neutral advice is a decline and worst case will put you out of business. We use information from enterprise consultants so best case is exponential growth, neutral is some growth and worst case is stability. It is the reason you will see department store YOY sales growth of 20-50% whereas SMES will be static or declining – they are absorbing the SME business.

You can use these for reference - the business forum posts will actually repress any growth but they did not understand those concepts so we decided to stop participating - it's a shame as the real business people will be taken out.

There are many ways to solve the same problem, but ultimately it comes down to how much time you are willing to spend, remmeber we in Q3 and a high proportion of sales are made in Q4, so if you miss Q4 sales for most sectors you will reduce your revenue by 50% for the year.

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In my opinion and experience I would personally go with Wordpress and WooCommerce due to the customisation and flexibility of these platforms.

I have been working with clients to monitor traffic and conversions to make tweaks which have resulted in a much higher conversion rate which means plenty more profit to the client.

You can use plugins such as WP All Import to transfer the entire product list over including images, descriptions, variations, etc.

Cheers,
Dave

For under 3 grand you can have it built on Bigcommerce or 3dCart. 3Dcart has come a long way in the last year and has some functionality built in that BigCommerce doesn't (multi-warehouse for example)but BigCommerce still has the better third party ecosystem. If that is the route you want to go it shouldn't be to hard.

That being said, have you checked out Magento CE or even Prestashop or Opencart? All three have a real strong third party developer market and as long as you test, there are some neat things you can do. Add on top of this, some really beautiful designs can be bought on the cheap. Just need better hosting is all.

Why take someone off a real shopping cart and put them onto a blogging platform that has been hacked (not a derogatory term) into a shopping cart.

You keep quoting this yet there seems to be tons of people doing more then 50k in revenue a year on a variety of platforms so I have no idea what you are talking about.

I would disagree, I think the modern shopping carts all around are much more conversion oriented and user friendly than some of the legacy carts like zen and oscommerce. Add on top of this the modern design principals (I am shocked the number of table based sites I still see being built), that help make the site more readable and modern and the biggest issue with cart change is translating attributes and options over than anything else.

The biggest issue you will have with the hosted carts is they more often then not don't allow you to import past orders which means you may need to stick with self hosted. You can import customers, just not past orders.

Both BigCommerce and 3dCart are shopping cart platforms that a TON of Solid Commerce customers swear by.

They're both great options right out of the box, with a ton of great built-in features and responsive themes to choose from.

They are all in the same category of platform, Nano Enterprise sub $200,000/yr revenue solutions (yes there are exceptions) averaging $50,000 revenue/yr. Magento CE is the next level up at Micro Enterprise.

The venture capitalists who fund our platform and won't deal with anyone who is targeting less than +20% YOY growth.

Yes, but you can also implement Magento CE for that price, we did one a few months ago for $2,500 - took 2wks - although we're not doing service provider work anymore.

No you do need to match it, off the shelf theme <$100, usually get them from ThemeForest and choose a high sale one.

Tier 3/4 are Nexcess, Tier 5/6 Sonassi, Tier 7 Siteground, we use Tier 1/2 but that is for corporates.

Over $50,000/yr revenue it is your hard work on a Nano Enterprise platform, most service providers take week to months to implement and code things that are not necessary - it breaks the site and causes problems when trying to adjust to business conditions - so you can't react.

You don't change Magento code, everything is ready to go, people only change it because they think they can gain an edge, what happens it that they lose the edge as they cannot react - everything has already been done before - just make yours the most trustworthy looking site - works 10x better.

The platform won't necessarily change your conversions, it might but you would expect ~20% difference, pricing, trust, shipping costs all come in to play.

Google remarketing seems the best at the moment, more exposure, just don't use GWT or Google Analytics - same as giving them the key to your front door, and we don't trust them that much.

It is not believe, it is a fact that will present itself next year, from a venture capital company who trade forex, commodites - if you target 20% growth you will see flat sales next year, <20% and you will be negative, the department stores are growing 20-50% online sales each year - taking sales from the SMEs. Most SMEs are backward looking - so will know the train is there when it hits them - we were waiting on some solutions to be build so thought could pass the growth knowledge on to people - you are basically the first in one year of 100s to 1,000s of posts that actually asked questions - so at least we helped one person which is always good.

Basically Magento CE is your platform as it designed for $200,000-$3million revenue, you are hitting the limits of WooCommerce at those levels. Sure, there are Nano Enterprises that make $millions on the platform, but you need to attach some intersting technology to make it work at those levels - we used some of it and although it works - it just feels limited.

Everyone always disagrees with us, we target growth and to do that you need to be in the top 5% - so by definition 95% will disagree (although it feels like 99% at the moment) - the top 5% of retailers generate 50% of all online revenue (comes down to trust) - hence their >20% YOY growth. Whether we get there or not is another matter - anyway we're going to be moving over to some different forums - well hopefully as they are closed invitation groups. Have some specialist consultants who worked for companies like Renault & L'Oreal participating (SAP) but also built layers that sit over Magento, WordPress, Drupal to make them act like a real enterprise solutions (rather than restricted open source platforms) - so get to see growth strategies which could be interesting given what the VCs told us.

What does it cost to have a completely custom template created for big commerce?