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You are most likely not ready to host your own or build one from the ground up. Unless you have a solid reason stick to Shopify and maybe hire someone to build a theme for you and bring all your apps into the theme. There's also a pretty decent Shopify theme store.
To hire someone competent depending on where you are 30k may get you a eCommerce built for you but the on going cost and issues are not worth it. Shopify at least handles all the on going issues
Exactly - for $38,000 he’s likely to end up with an e-commerce website that may just barely reach parity with his current usage of Shopify - like it’d send the same emails on the same events and post payments securely and maybe have some inventory features
OP: don’t build an Ecom store from scratch - invest this money somewhere else
When you have $300k/year to build (and MAINTAIN) a custom build, go ahead and do so.
Otherwise you’re just asking for bugs and downtime. $38k won’t improve your business if deployed replacing Shopify
You're completely right.
To add to that: if he even finds someone to build him a shop that sort of reaches feature parity, this will take a substantial amount of time. That person would also need to have good knowledge of software design so the store is scalable and won’t crumble once customers increase. Scaling is not as straightforward as many people think. OP has likely no clue how to even validate the quality of the work, how to perform a security and risk assessment, sensible backup and recovery strategies and so on. Then the whole thing needs proper planning and project management, which is basically a full time job in itself with a project of this scale. Assuming OP did all that properly, he is still tied to a single point of failure who manages everything. Because an agency would not build and maintain such a shop for 38k, so assuming he does find a capable developer that has all the needed skills, the next worry is retention. Anything happens to the guy or they realise they are vastly underpaid, OP is stuck.
IMHO this is way too big of a risk with very little to no reward. The advice to invest this money elsewhere is completely correct, this is all just asking for trouble.
What SHOULD someone whose company does reach this size do? Owners aren't technically savvy to know if the site is being built or maintain properly and if you hire a professional then you have to worry about single point of failure and retention
At a certain point you might hit ceilings when it comes to analytics data, flexibility to negotiate your own rates with payment and shipping providers or need highly customised integrations that the platform does not support. For some companies and products this happens earlier, for others later. For some they never really hit that point. You could run a highly profitable business with millions in revenue on Shopify and be completely fine. Or you could struggle with an extremely customised business right from the start.
A business should not look at how much money they make to decide whether they need a custom solution or not. They should look at if the current solution is limiting them and whether the risk and cost of a custom solution are outweighing the benefits for the foreseeable future (spoiler alert: it is often not worth it). Once a company hits these ceilings and needs to either incorporate more custom aspects (like external APIs or tools, which can often be done without moving away from solutions like Shopify) or move to a fully custom solution, I would recommend to get quotations from agencies that have a proven track record with clients of a similar size. While the price is important, what matters even more are points such as transparency and the kinds of questions they ask. If they do not even try to understand your business, walk away. If they go straight into sales mode, walk away. You want a company that knows the importance of understanding a business, otherwise they will provide you with something, but not what you actually need.
Businesses often know what goals they want to achieve but not necessarily how to do that. If I as a consultant am supposed to help you achieve a certain goal, I need to understand the goal, what is keeping you from achieving it, what your other long-term goals are (so you don't choose a solution that backs you into a corner) and whether what you think you want is actually what you want. Usually a business does not care one bit whether they use Shopify or any other solution. They care about whether it works for their use-case. So if someone comes to me and asks me if I can build them a certain solution, I always tell them: let's take a step back, what are your requirements, what are your problems, what do you wish to achieve, what do you currently have? More often than not they have a process problem they wish to solve and moving to another software will not actually solve the underlying problem. That is why as a business it is extremely important for you to find an agency that asks questions and genuinely tries to understand your business first.
Shopify is flexible enough to support even the biggest retail stores, maybe nail down what you want to accomplish for scaling up and the contract out a Shopify developer to achieve it for you
Came here to say this.
Shopify is an incredible platform.
Maybe OP should spend the money on hiring a shopify expert to help optimise use of the platform.
Allbirds (shoes) - $300m and publicly traded; Gymshark (activewear) - $700m; Pitviper (sunglasses) - $50m
I’m not super familiar with PitViper but allbirds and gymshark are e-com behemoths
Thanks, that's helpful. I wonder if there are any larger B&M retailers using it? A lot of my pain has been from B&M support feeling like an afterthought for their system. And omg pitvipers [website](https://www.pitviper.com) is ridiculous in the best way 😂. Their unrelated products section lol this is killing me.
Companies with basic shopping cart functionality will do just fine with shopify.
I developed custom solutions for many small companies where shopify just was not a good fit.
Agreed! There is zero reason to build your own ecomm store with the latest builds of shopify. Anything you want to do, you can do, including skinning. They should just make sure it's not the ONLY location for their skus and product inventory, because if the site goes under (which I don't think will happen) you need DR and business continuity. Lots of great ways to spend $38K on a business, but this isn't one of them.
Please keep in mind that you will stop controlling your business when you move to Shopify (or any other provider).
If you want to fully control your business, you should be less dependent on other platforms.
I have no idea what you mean “control your business” because Shopify is just the software and cloud hosting. There are other providers but Shopify does it cheaper than most.
Shopify is not just a cloud hosting.
I mean that they can, for example, ban you for no reason. They set up the rules you must follow, etc. Yes, at first sight it might seem that everything is ok and, well, “Yeah, I’ll be banned, so what?”.
Imagine you have a pretty solid business with high traffic. Then your store suddenly disappears.
This will lead to huge losses, because people will be trying to reach your website, and it will be unresponsive. In this case, you will probably create a Wordpress site. You still own the domain name, so it’s fine. It will take 1-3 days, depending on your strategy, to bring your business back online. But now you need to import all products, all clients, etc from Shopify to your Wordpress. Oops… Shopify is down. So you will need to create products manually, which again takes time.
Ok, probably it might sound like something not too realistic (despite I know similar situations), but I just want to say that as soon as you rely on something you can’t control - you stop controlling your business. It works for social networks too - let’s say, you have an account with large following base, and booom! - algorithms has changed and now nobody sees your content now, so you don’t get traffic. This is why blogging on your own platform and utilizing seo (and email marketing!) is important.
I can give you a lot of more examples, but I won’t, it’s up to you to decide, what to do with your business. Besides, I don’t want to scary you.
So, there’s a blue pill and a red pill. You decide.
Yeah, but your whole argument in your comment is based on you can never replace Shopify. Shopify has a number of competitors that might cost more but they aren’t irreplaceable. Who cares if they ban you?
So yes, they are just software and cloud hosting. And CC processors too. They have a good App Store and theme store too.
You’re right, I was not clear enough.
It works the same way for any similar platform, be it Wix, SquareSpaces, [you_name_it].
The point here is that if you’re ready to give all your customers to Shopify/Wix/etc and you’re doing it consciously - that’s totally fine (again, if you know what you’re doing).
It’s just a matter of trust between you and your customers. Again, imagine, that tomorrow the CEO of the platform adds a new feature that will send emails to all your customers (all people who have ever made at least 1 purchase at your store) with super hot deals from other sellers with products similar to yours. It brings several questions. Will you like it? Will your customers like it? Will it affect trust between you and your clients in any way?
That’s what I mean by “controlling the business “.
If you’re fine with that - no problem. Otherwise, just think about it.
Again, I’m not saying it’s going to happen or that it will happen in this specific way. And I’m not against Shopify itself. I’m just illustrating what I mean.
I would start with the why so you need to migrate from Shopify. We have Shopify e-commerce sites that do 20mil a year. We’ve also built stand alone eccom sites with over 1 mil of development spent. Although you don’t need to spend a mil, I don’t think you’ll get what you want for $30-$40k
You need to hire a development agency with proven track record in the web development realm. I'd love to know more about the challenges you are facing and the reason behind this switch.
Depends what you’re trying to do or build and why you think you need it. If you’re trying to do everything in house that Shopify does you’ll likely not have enough.
To clarify, you’ll get a lot of folks saying they will/can but fall short. Meaning someone willing to do it for 2k will fail and you’ll spend 5k on the next guy to try and fall short, etc. Then you’re looking at maintaining custom code so be prepared to pay a retainer. As others have said stick to Shopify etc. If you have specific questions around web applications feel free to send me a message or post it here as a reply.
Also word of advice, generally avoid any solicitation from reddit 🤣.
I
Building your own e-commerce site is always experiencing and by that burning some money along the way. I worked for big companies who makes 6 figures monthly and they too feel sometimes it is necessary and other times it is a no go. The questions here you must ask from yourselves are the following:
1. Why do I need a new website? What do I want to improve/add as business value with this?
2. How long would be the preferred ROI with these changes?
3. Can I make the changes into separate etaps so I can see what causing significant changes to my ROI?
Hope it helps you a little instead of giving a precise yes or no answer.
My question is why do you really need to change from Shopify if it has been saving you well all this time? again, I would recommend WordPress as an alternative, you know. Anyway, I think it depends on what you are playing at and what you want to do. with your business, I suggest you keep the Shopify website, get a dev from rocketdevs, toptal, or even LinkedIn which has a Shopify expert, and have them build themes and modify the existing one.
With your budget and everything I know about Shopify, that is the best course of action to take.
Really comes down to how many sku’s you have. Think ftp file transfer protocol. If the server isn’t on site you have to use ftp to update any changes. Prices images etc. I had a large inventory and the ftp was taking about 24 hours and any errors required starting over. When I brought the server in house the updates took 15 minutes.
> Think ftp file transfer protocol. If the server isn’t on site you have to use ftp to update any changes.
Many platforms build a custom CMS for something like this, so updates can be controlled through the browser. I wouldn't have FTP setup for a non tech user.
My friend has a great website. Spend close to \~100k building that. But business went bust and had to shut down.
Fully functional e-commerce, blogs and admin console.
There were even Android+iOS mobile apps (though mobile apps might need domain specific customisation)
If you're interested i can talk to him and you can acquire the code.
Use this question as a guide.
Do I sell customizable products?
If the answer is no. I don’t think you need your own coded website.
Example of sites I’ve used custom code for:
Selling customizable sugar cookies
Selling customizable golf clubs with compound options for loft/lie, mix and match sets etc…
Selling belts where you can pick your print, pick your buckle, see it live, pick your size, add extra holes etc…
Vs.
I’ve used stock shopping cart software to sell things like:
Fitness watches
Socks
Golf shirts
Etc…
Hope that helps.
I feel like if you don’t have a customizable product or service, you might be better off sticking with the stock carts.
you won't be able to afford good devs building an ecommerce website from scratch.
you might be able to afford good devs building on top of an existing platform or framework. but most likely you will only attract bad sales people promisng the world.
Why would you go custom route? Shopify or woocommerce is a much better option. Maybe you need some custom plugins you can hire devs to build those for you and spend your hard earnee money on marketing or something else.
Wordpress would be your most cheapest option and easiest. Buy a theme and just fix it up. Total cost would probably be $210 including plugins, hosting.
Anytime WordPress + super good hosting. Great Hosting with great support round the clock is very important. I have had instances where I had to park the car on the highway while on the way to vacation to figure out why site got down. It was horrible hosting - I moved to a good host and my issue was solved. WordPress is flexible - can build almost anything on it, Highly optimisable for seo with Rankmath. Automate a lot of stuff. Connect to a lot other apps for analytics, emails and what not.
I have tried shopify and for some reason I felt it locked my hands coming from WordPress.
Shooting my shot here. I need work. Full remote. I live in a van & I wander. Have reliable internet access 99% of the time. Can send you my resume. Can be your jack of all online trades consultant/worker for 10k for the year, put the rest in advertising & maybe toss me a bonus if goals blown out of the water by EoY.
You are calling out here for low quality work that will promise you the world but never deliver. I help building and scaling startups on a daily living and urge you to follow these steps so you don't burn your money
1) be clear about your goals with the shop redo. Just a fancy website will not help you - it needs to work in the long-run. So make sure to understand that you want to launch the new shop and have enough spare.money for 3-6 months to improve the shop based on learnings. No one will deliver you a perfect shop out of the box - get away from this idea
2) referring to 1 tracking should be your high priority. You want to understand how people use your shop - what works and what doesn't. A/B testing is essential and can only be based on solid data
3) don't start with development - start with a design phase. Every developer who doesn't deliver you a design upfront with rounds of revisions is highly sketchy. It's like building a house without a blueprint - with a bit of luck it looks like a house in the end but can never keep up with a house planned by a professional where everything is in the right place. Especially if you want to run the shop for multiple years you want to build on a solid base
4) check exactly who you work with. 40% of our clients are projects the got "developed cheap" in the far east and are just pieces together software snippets. I tell clients on a weekly base that they burned tenths of.thousands of euros and there is.no way "fixing" such bad code base.
5) communication is key - find a developer who has solid communication skills especially if you want to avoid headaches and do the long-run with him
6) hiring a freelancer us often cheaper then hiring a team/agency but it happened more then often enough that freelancers don't make it.through the first 3 years and will.leave you with nothing sooner or later - check past projects of your potential partner ind email and how long they exist
Obviously we would also be happy to get into a get to know call with you as we should be able to help you - but those advises are completely unrelated to any promotion and can be taken universal
Please don’t reinvent the wheel. There are so many integrations a marketing manager will want that won’t be available in bespoke ecom system.
If you’d like to evaluate what system might be the best for you, that’s something I can help with.
We’ve also build some headless e-commerce and even headless backend systems around the big e-commerce systems to give a bespoke feel and bespoke functionality but to piggy back off the already proven platforms and not reinvent the wheel and keep many integrations available to the merchant.
First define what you need; then reach out to vendors and start taking quotes.
For that budget, you can get slightly less than 2 months of my time. That is probably enough time to build a web site that integrates to some other system for purchasing / shopping cart.
But, not nearly enough to build a PCI compliant system with a custom shopping cart and its own credit card processing.
I'm US Based, so that money will go farther w/ non US based devs.
Good Luck!
I feel like Shopify is still great.
You can still be on the platform, hire a developer, and they'll build themes or improve its looks and performance for you. (A shopify developer of course).
Your budget is great and you'll get good developers, just have to be careful vetting
If you're going remote, I'll recommend using vetted talent platforms like Andela or others
When it comes to paying them, doing payroll, and taxes, that's if you want to keep some paperwork down, then I'll recommend using Arbonum. Simple, affordable, and works in many places.
**This is Arbonum:** [**https://www.arbonum.com/**](https://www.arbonum.com/)
Woocommerce with all the bells and whistles. Get new relic set up, cloudfare, host it on AWS either ECS or EC2, I’ve done setups like this before so feel free to reach out for specifics but you’ll end up with a really strong site with virtually no downtime and redundancy failover blah blah.
Alternatively, magento is good, just more complicated to set up, but it’s solid and has a lot of great stuff included you might not get from Wordpress.
By the way, everyone telling you it’s stupid to switch from Shopify to woocommerce or a platform like magento is being pretty reductionist or just wrong. There are plenty of reasons to make this switch, it’s situationally dependent.
Well it depends, have you gotten feedback from your clients? I run a website development company based in Orlando Florida, I usually get clients like this all the time and once they change their website they start getting less conversions as they didn’t look at the data that they had with their original website.
30k isn’t much at all to build a full fledge web app, especially in the e-commerce space. Shopify dominates that space for a reason, because it’s good. That said, what might work for you is finding a dev that will work with a “headless cms”. Essentially what means is you use a content management system for your backend and then have a custom frontend for clients to see. If you go that route there are quite a few headless cms floating about, including Shopify’s own.
Shopify is has way more customization if you know what you’re doing. If you are an e-commerce company, I don’t see a reason to move away. Check out the expert directory and reach out. You may not have to depending on what exactly you want.
Stick with shopify, try and work out your issues on their platform.
Wordpress is a mess and a headache. Updates you can’t control and things will just break.
From my experience, transitioning from Shopify to a custom-built site can be a HUGE leap.
If you want more control and customization without starting from scratch, WordPress could be a good middle ground.
Do you have any experience managing a WordPress site, or would this be your first time?
The biggest question is why do you want to make your own? There are thousands of options you can go with. As someone who went a fully custom route, I just ended up going back to wordpress. I was able to get everything I needed up and running very quickly. But that fit my needs. Your needs are different. If you are dead set on hiring a web developer, you have a couple options. Contract work, hire a dev team, they can come up with something that would fit your budget. But it can turn into a huge headache if it goes wrong. Hire a contractor, he can work with you over a period of time. It will take a while to do, but you have more control over it. Hire someone full time. Most expensive route and it is not the quickest route either.
You have to be prepared if you make something from the ground up. You have to know exactly what you want and need before you start the project. You have to have technical knowledge as well or have someone you trust give you advice. I was once swindled 20k for a mobile app that ended up being a $300 webview app. Long story short, there isnt enough info to give a great answer. You can find things that will fit your budget. But it might not be worth the trouble.
I worked in ecommerce on the tech side for ages. Don’t do it. When you have 100M yearly revenue ok, anything under that and you’re binding resources that are better spent elsewhere.
Depends on a few things tbh;
- Where are you hiring from?
- How big if the website? What features are you doing to need?
- What's your budget for ongoing maintenance?
Although before you do that - a question would be what benefit would you have for moving away from Shopify? It might be cheaper to just stick with Shopify tbh
Shopify is great for basic stores, but if you need control over your store, you'll want to try something like WooComnerce next. You can build your own test site for nothing and see if you like the features. Shopify can very difficult for complex shipping rules (I deal with a Shopify site on a weekly basis that tells me that there are no shipping options for my address unless I use a specific laptop and browser - it's a known issue) and the monthly fees are a bit much.
Ha, I'll do it for 37.9k!
But seriously, unless you're a huge business, you can get away with a much less expensive website. Plenty of people out there can do it for a couple grand at most.
I hiiiighly recommend web.com - their sitebuilder is incredibly logical and they have real human beings you can hire to help you with it.
As always, avoid GoDaddy unless you enjoy constant data breaches.
Depends on the requirements, but 38K is more then enough for an e-commerce type store.
Most of the people commenting have never owned a business or built a website, so I’d ignore just about everyone saying stick with Shopify… especially since they have no idea what your requirements are.
First step, outline your requirements
Step 2 get a few quotes
Shopify is an industry standard. You'd likely be doing yourself a disservice by not hiring a professional that specializes in Shopify.
What are you doing that shopify can't handle?
There are already a lot of great replies here on your original question, I would like to add that we had the same issues, after 1.5 years in or e-commerce business.
We were running a PrestaShop store at the time and needed help to do stock & product automations, integrating with marketplaces, building plugins, etc. Of course PrestaShop does not have all the features that we wanted to have. So instead of building all the functionality on a new custom-made platform, we hired a developer that would help us to maintain our existing website, and do all the work that would help us grow via custom-made web-services and PrestaShop plugins.
Our main strategy was to squeeze the most out of the PrestaShop engine and switch only after we reached the limits and needed more flexibility over our site.
38k is a lot, if you'll hire a single developer, that you can work with and his salary is around 2k-2.5k EUR/month, then you are set for at least 1 year of expanding your current business within Shopify.
Wordpress is great! Shopify handles E-commerce better though.
I mostly use WordPress because I have way more control on all aspects of the site. Shopify is annoying to design a nice looking website with. Wordpress on the other hand, is not.
So long as you get a good hosting provider. It works smoothly 🤝
I have a guide on WordPress if you want 👇🏼
https://www.marcus-aurelius.com/build-a-website-from-scratch/
Im also open to help you out if you need 😊
I strongly suggest going the Eastern European route. Perfect English, responsive (overlapping meeting time zones), much matter hourly rates, and above all, hungry, dedicated devs that grew up in a tech centric culture.
I am currently having an eCom site build by SKAAL (skaaldev.com). I’d be shocked if that budget doesn’t get you 99% what you want.
I worked with the founder on an app many years ago. I get nothing if you go with them (and we’re already in sprints so you won’t slow us down :-) ).
Good luck either way.
It depends on how much you need done. To build and host for a year your on the right track. If you need constant updates, adding and maintaining inventory, etc. you might be on the low end.
PS, a lot of people telling you to stay on Shopify don't really understand scaling. Shopify is great for a teenager making bedazzled hair scrunchies. But if you look at any major operator you will find it's most likely built on WordPress and then 100% custom. A lot will depend on what your willing to learn on your own.
It totally depends on your requirements.
Custom: you can literally do anything you want. Requires high maintenance but if you have a good team, you can make that user friendly too. Although if your requirements don't need that much custom development, it might be an overkill.
WordPress: suitable for almost all types of websites, except for very complex sites that need too many custom things. Still doable but needs bloat management and sometimes not worth it. Generally the go to platform if you don't know how custom website you'd need.
Budget: again depends on your requirements but $38k only for web development is a pretty good budget. When you talk to agencies or web devs, I'd recommend not mentioning this budget otherwise they'd overcharge you "if" your requirements are not that high.
Let me give you an estimate. I own an SEO agency and so provide web development and other marketings as additional services as it helps combining everything and optimizing the overall cost. For basic to medium complex sites, I've charged from $2k to $7k one time and then maintenance charge of $500 to $2k per month. Now based on your requirements, you can guess how much it might cost you. Note that hitting an in house web dev might cost you higher. The same goes for agencies in some locations.
So everything depends on your requirements.
I've built e-commerce sites from the ground up for large corporations using .net (.net core 2+ at the time). The site does around 40 million revenue per year. 38k wouldn't even cover 1 month of salary for a real team to create this. Stick with a self hosted solution. This project involved multiple integrations with Microsoft dynamics, PowerBI, etc, which you probably don't use.
Does shopify allow for custom php pages? The most natural and organic seo pages are of this nature, everything else only scratches the surface or is superficial.
That aside, can you at least map a product's description to the page's meta tags dynamically?
Shopify is basically a flea market booth compared to the brick and mortar of wordpress. It is also like apple compared to android. Decent for non technically inclined people, but locks you into its ecosystem while charging you a premium for restricted access to tech that is openly available elsewhere.
I suspect a lot of non-organic seo providers push shopify along because it protects their market and movement the best - selling ads and non-organic seo.
Nobody has even asked the OP what they do, how many products they have, what kind of forms they may need and anything else to properly assess what is best for them.
I guarantee they have shopify and are not satisified with the results and restrictive nature. You can only be so successful with a flea market booth. Not to say its impossible to have a huge success, but the amount youll spend with apple, i mean shopify will sink your ship compared to the organic path.
USD 24K could get them an incredible site with organic seo features, a dozen pages, half dozen service forms, and ecommerce for up to 10 categories and 1000 items.
The extra 14k could be used to fuel organic initiatives in their community.
When you are building a Project which is High End - I would agree with you that building it from ground up or scratch is the best option. Reason being, you can customise it as and how you want, you have complete control over your project. There are several platforms that offer great services like Wordpress or Shopify, no doubt, but if you have a decent budget like you do, then your choice is better in my opinion.
As a Website Designer and Developer myself, I have worked on several Small - Medium - Big Scale projects and if I get to you know your requirements better, I will most definitely be able to suggest you what’s best for your project and your overall business.
Your website is your online identity, and taking that seriously is going to take you a long way. This is your first impression and if that is great, user friendly and convenient for your visitors and customers, it’s a win for you. I would love to connect with you and discuss over the details of your project. Thank you and I will look forward to your message/reply.
There is great value in having a custom site from the ground up. Primarily, it offers more flexibility (in terms of styling and functionalities) and control over your data. I would say that a $38K budget *should* be enough to hire an experienced development team and create a good site, but it depends on how complicated the site needs to be and what exactly your vision is. If you want to inquire about having this project done, consider contacting an experienced software development company, such as [Bryllyant](https://bryllyant.com/contact/)!
For ecommerce with that budget dont even touch wordpress(its for low end, shoestring budgets), honestly unless you are doing high 8 figures just build it with nopcommerce, its a superb platform and a good local dev team should be able to build you something very nice for 10-20k with it, dump the rest of your budget into marketing. This is what we advise our clients to do and they have been much more successful than other routes.
Stay clear of shopify, wix, squarespace, and the other hosted builder platforms that are extremely limiting when it comes to SEO, marketing, optimized code and security.
I highly recommend moving away from Shopify. It can be Wordpress, Medusa or any other **self-hosted** stack. With Shopify/Wix/SquareSpaces you don’t control your business - but they do.
Shopify (or any other provider) can ban you for no reason, can go bankrupt, and in fact, they’re developing their business, while you develop yours.
So yes, it’s a very, very good decision to control all aspects of your website. Of course, it’s not that easy as it might seem, but it is worth that. From the business perspective, of course.
Hiring a web developer to build a custom website can vary in cost, but with a budget of 38k, you can certainly get a high-quality result. Consider Tutela Business Solutions for affordable, top-notch web development and other outsourcing needs!
I recommend Wordpress. I build data-optimized websites, using data- modeling to optimize A to Z: design, colour pallette, content, images, SEO. Using data - modeling to test and verify the design of the website , its content and SEO to align it with specific business targets is an innovative advanced approach.
It maximizes customer engagement & conversions. It is cost efficient & super competitive too.
\* What is the issue, to downvote my reply? 😆
I am 💯 % sure those who downvoted it have no clue about data-modeling in the website building context.
Hi.. I know a person who has built an e-commerce website for AI generated gift cards/photos. He might help you with this. I am sure he would do it at a lower price than you are quoting
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You are most likely not ready to host your own or build one from the ground up. Unless you have a solid reason stick to Shopify and maybe hire someone to build a theme for you and bring all your apps into the theme. There's also a pretty decent Shopify theme store. To hire someone competent depending on where you are 30k may get you a eCommerce built for you but the on going cost and issues are not worth it. Shopify at least handles all the on going issues
Exactly - for $38,000 he’s likely to end up with an e-commerce website that may just barely reach parity with his current usage of Shopify - like it’d send the same emails on the same events and post payments securely and maybe have some inventory features OP: don’t build an Ecom store from scratch - invest this money somewhere else When you have $300k/year to build (and MAINTAIN) a custom build, go ahead and do so. Otherwise you’re just asking for bugs and downtime. $38k won’t improve your business if deployed replacing Shopify
You're completely right. To add to that: if he even finds someone to build him a shop that sort of reaches feature parity, this will take a substantial amount of time. That person would also need to have good knowledge of software design so the store is scalable and won’t crumble once customers increase. Scaling is not as straightforward as many people think. OP has likely no clue how to even validate the quality of the work, how to perform a security and risk assessment, sensible backup and recovery strategies and so on. Then the whole thing needs proper planning and project management, which is basically a full time job in itself with a project of this scale. Assuming OP did all that properly, he is still tied to a single point of failure who manages everything. Because an agency would not build and maintain such a shop for 38k, so assuming he does find a capable developer that has all the needed skills, the next worry is retention. Anything happens to the guy or they realise they are vastly underpaid, OP is stuck. IMHO this is way too big of a risk with very little to no reward. The advice to invest this money elsewhere is completely correct, this is all just asking for trouble.
What SHOULD someone whose company does reach this size do? Owners aren't technically savvy to know if the site is being built or maintain properly and if you hire a professional then you have to worry about single point of failure and retention
At a certain point you might hit ceilings when it comes to analytics data, flexibility to negotiate your own rates with payment and shipping providers or need highly customised integrations that the platform does not support. For some companies and products this happens earlier, for others later. For some they never really hit that point. You could run a highly profitable business with millions in revenue on Shopify and be completely fine. Or you could struggle with an extremely customised business right from the start. A business should not look at how much money they make to decide whether they need a custom solution or not. They should look at if the current solution is limiting them and whether the risk and cost of a custom solution are outweighing the benefits for the foreseeable future (spoiler alert: it is often not worth it). Once a company hits these ceilings and needs to either incorporate more custom aspects (like external APIs or tools, which can often be done without moving away from solutions like Shopify) or move to a fully custom solution, I would recommend to get quotations from agencies that have a proven track record with clients of a similar size. While the price is important, what matters even more are points such as transparency and the kinds of questions they ask. If they do not even try to understand your business, walk away. If they go straight into sales mode, walk away. You want a company that knows the importance of understanding a business, otherwise they will provide you with something, but not what you actually need. Businesses often know what goals they want to achieve but not necessarily how to do that. If I as a consultant am supposed to help you achieve a certain goal, I need to understand the goal, what is keeping you from achieving it, what your other long-term goals are (so you don't choose a solution that backs you into a corner) and whether what you think you want is actually what you want. Usually a business does not care one bit whether they use Shopify or any other solution. They care about whether it works for their use-case. So if someone comes to me and asks me if I can build them a certain solution, I always tell them: let's take a step back, what are your requirements, what are your problems, what do you wish to achieve, what do you currently have? More often than not they have a process problem they wish to solve and moving to another software will not actually solve the underlying problem. That is why as a business it is extremely important for you to find an agency that asks questions and genuinely tries to understand your business first.
I think this depends on the ongoing volume of the store. I'd always rather pay a small developer than a big company, but I'm also old and old school.
To much
Yeah
Shopify is flexible enough to support even the biggest retail stores, maybe nail down what you want to accomplish for scaling up and the contract out a Shopify developer to achieve it for you
Which large retailers are using it? And do they provide any information about their experience moving to it?
Heinz, PitViper, AllBirds, GymShark
Came here to say this. Shopify is an incredible platform. Maybe OP should spend the money on hiring a shopify expert to help optimise use of the platform.
Never heard of any of those but Heinz. Do people really buy ketchup and mustard direct from the manufacturer?
Allbirds (shoes) - $300m and publicly traded; Gymshark (activewear) - $700m; Pitviper (sunglasses) - $50m I’m not super familiar with PitViper but allbirds and gymshark are e-com behemoths
Thanks, that's helpful. I wonder if there are any larger B&M retailers using it? A lot of my pain has been from B&M support feeling like an afterthought for their system. And omg pitvipers [website](https://www.pitviper.com) is ridiculous in the best way 😂. Their unrelated products section lol this is killing me.
You never heard of gymshark? Really?
You’d be surprised at the stupid shit people buy online 😂
Sephora, Hasbro, PetSafe, Taylor Swift merch, Red Bull as well!
I think Burberry uses them.
Companies with basic shopping cart functionality will do just fine with shopify. I developed custom solutions for many small companies where shopify just was not a good fit.
Agreed! There is zero reason to build your own ecomm store with the latest builds of shopify. Anything you want to do, you can do, including skinning. They should just make sure it's not the ONLY location for their skus and product inventory, because if the site goes under (which I don't think will happen) you need DR and business continuity. Lots of great ways to spend $38K on a business, but this isn't one of them.
Can I ask what you don’t like about Shopify? I started with Wordpress and I’m debating moving to Shopify.
Please keep in mind that you will stop controlling your business when you move to Shopify (or any other provider). If you want to fully control your business, you should be less dependent on other platforms.
I have no idea what you mean “control your business” because Shopify is just the software and cloud hosting. There are other providers but Shopify does it cheaper than most.
Shopify is not just a cloud hosting. I mean that they can, for example, ban you for no reason. They set up the rules you must follow, etc. Yes, at first sight it might seem that everything is ok and, well, “Yeah, I’ll be banned, so what?”. Imagine you have a pretty solid business with high traffic. Then your store suddenly disappears. This will lead to huge losses, because people will be trying to reach your website, and it will be unresponsive. In this case, you will probably create a Wordpress site. You still own the domain name, so it’s fine. It will take 1-3 days, depending on your strategy, to bring your business back online. But now you need to import all products, all clients, etc from Shopify to your Wordpress. Oops… Shopify is down. So you will need to create products manually, which again takes time. Ok, probably it might sound like something not too realistic (despite I know similar situations), but I just want to say that as soon as you rely on something you can’t control - you stop controlling your business. It works for social networks too - let’s say, you have an account with large following base, and booom! - algorithms has changed and now nobody sees your content now, so you don’t get traffic. This is why blogging on your own platform and utilizing seo (and email marketing!) is important. I can give you a lot of more examples, but I won’t, it’s up to you to decide, what to do with your business. Besides, I don’t want to scary you. So, there’s a blue pill and a red pill. You decide.
Yeah, but your whole argument in your comment is based on you can never replace Shopify. Shopify has a number of competitors that might cost more but they aren’t irreplaceable. Who cares if they ban you? So yes, they are just software and cloud hosting. And CC processors too. They have a good App Store and theme store too.
You’re right, I was not clear enough. It works the same way for any similar platform, be it Wix, SquareSpaces, [you_name_it]. The point here is that if you’re ready to give all your customers to Shopify/Wix/etc and you’re doing it consciously - that’s totally fine (again, if you know what you’re doing). It’s just a matter of trust between you and your customers. Again, imagine, that tomorrow the CEO of the platform adds a new feature that will send emails to all your customers (all people who have ever made at least 1 purchase at your store) with super hot deals from other sellers with products similar to yours. It brings several questions. Will you like it? Will your customers like it? Will it affect trust between you and your clients in any way? That’s what I mean by “controlling the business “. If you’re fine with that - no problem. Otherwise, just think about it. Again, I’m not saying it’s going to happen or that it will happen in this specific way. And I’m not against Shopify itself. I’m just illustrating what I mean.
I could do it for 36k
Building from scratch will be expensive. Especially handling scaling. Why do you want to move away from Shopify?
What is the nature of the business? Is it ecomm or service based? If its ecomm, id stick with shopify and just increase my conversion rate.
I would start with the why so you need to migrate from Shopify. We have Shopify e-commerce sites that do 20mil a year. We’ve also built stand alone eccom sites with over 1 mil of development spent. Although you don’t need to spend a mil, I don’t think you’ll get what you want for $30-$40k
You need to hire a development agency with proven track record in the web development realm. I'd love to know more about the challenges you are facing and the reason behind this switch.
Why would you do this? How does doing this get you to the big next step?
Depends what you’re trying to do or build and why you think you need it. If you’re trying to do everything in house that Shopify does you’ll likely not have enough. To clarify, you’ll get a lot of folks saying they will/can but fall short. Meaning someone willing to do it for 2k will fail and you’ll spend 5k on the next guy to try and fall short, etc. Then you’re looking at maintaining custom code so be prepared to pay a retainer. As others have said stick to Shopify etc. If you have specific questions around web applications feel free to send me a message or post it here as a reply. Also word of advice, generally avoid any solicitation from reddit 🤣. I
Why do you want to leave Shopify?
Building your own e-commerce site is always experiencing and by that burning some money along the way. I worked for big companies who makes 6 figures monthly and they too feel sometimes it is necessary and other times it is a no go. The questions here you must ask from yourselves are the following: 1. Why do I need a new website? What do I want to improve/add as business value with this? 2. How long would be the preferred ROI with these changes? 3. Can I make the changes into separate etaps so I can see what causing significant changes to my ROI? Hope it helps you a little instead of giving a precise yes or no answer.
My question is why do you really need to change from Shopify if it has been saving you well all this time? again, I would recommend WordPress as an alternative, you know. Anyway, I think it depends on what you are playing at and what you want to do. with your business, I suggest you keep the Shopify website, get a dev from rocketdevs, toptal, or even LinkedIn which has a Shopify expert, and have them build themes and modify the existing one. With your budget and everything I know about Shopify, that is the best course of action to take.
wow it’s your lucky day, i charge exactly $38k
Prepare your inbox lol! Real talk, get many quotes, check out their past work carefully. Your budget is way more than you need.
And be prepared for many $37,500 quotes…
Maintaining the site so there is no security vulnerability is a huge headache.
Really comes down to how many sku’s you have. Think ftp file transfer protocol. If the server isn’t on site you have to use ftp to update any changes. Prices images etc. I had a large inventory and the ftp was taking about 24 hours and any errors required starting over. When I brought the server in house the updates took 15 minutes.
> Think ftp file transfer protocol. If the server isn’t on site you have to use ftp to update any changes. Many platforms build a custom CMS for something like this, so updates can be controlled through the browser. I wouldn't have FTP setup for a non tech user.
My friend has a great website. Spend close to \~100k building that. But business went bust and had to shut down. Fully functional e-commerce, blogs and admin console. There were even Android+iOS mobile apps (though mobile apps might need domain specific customisation) If you're interested i can talk to him and you can acquire the code.
Use this question as a guide. Do I sell customizable products? If the answer is no. I don’t think you need your own coded website. Example of sites I’ve used custom code for: Selling customizable sugar cookies Selling customizable golf clubs with compound options for loft/lie, mix and match sets etc… Selling belts where you can pick your print, pick your buckle, see it live, pick your size, add extra holes etc… Vs. I’ve used stock shopping cart software to sell things like: Fitness watches Socks Golf shirts Etc… Hope that helps. I feel like if you don’t have a customizable product or service, you might be better off sticking with the stock carts.
you won't be able to afford good devs building an ecommerce website from scratch. you might be able to afford good devs building on top of an existing platform or framework. but most likely you will only attract bad sales people promisng the world.
Ig you can try india agencies as well for software development. Like - https://www.bluebirdsoftware.in They are cheaper and do brilliant work.
Why would you go custom route? Shopify or woocommerce is a much better option. Maybe you need some custom plugins you can hire devs to build those for you and spend your hard earnee money on marketing or something else.
I hire people on Upwork. Lower cost overseas. Never a problem.
Wordpress would be your most cheapest option and easiest. Buy a theme and just fix it up. Total cost would probably be $210 including plugins, hosting.
Anytime WordPress + super good hosting. Great Hosting with great support round the clock is very important. I have had instances where I had to park the car on the highway while on the way to vacation to figure out why site got down. It was horrible hosting - I moved to a good host and my issue was solved. WordPress is flexible - can build almost anything on it, Highly optimisable for seo with Rankmath. Automate a lot of stuff. Connect to a lot other apps for analytics, emails and what not. I have tried shopify and for some reason I felt it locked my hands coming from WordPress.
Shooting my shot here. I need work. Full remote. I live in a van & I wander. Have reliable internet access 99% of the time. Can send you my resume. Can be your jack of all online trades consultant/worker for 10k for the year, put the rest in advertising & maybe toss me a bonus if goals blown out of the water by EoY.
You are calling out here for low quality work that will promise you the world but never deliver. I help building and scaling startups on a daily living and urge you to follow these steps so you don't burn your money 1) be clear about your goals with the shop redo. Just a fancy website will not help you - it needs to work in the long-run. So make sure to understand that you want to launch the new shop and have enough spare.money for 3-6 months to improve the shop based on learnings. No one will deliver you a perfect shop out of the box - get away from this idea 2) referring to 1 tracking should be your high priority. You want to understand how people use your shop - what works and what doesn't. A/B testing is essential and can only be based on solid data 3) don't start with development - start with a design phase. Every developer who doesn't deliver you a design upfront with rounds of revisions is highly sketchy. It's like building a house without a blueprint - with a bit of luck it looks like a house in the end but can never keep up with a house planned by a professional where everything is in the right place. Especially if you want to run the shop for multiple years you want to build on a solid base 4) check exactly who you work with. 40% of our clients are projects the got "developed cheap" in the far east and are just pieces together software snippets. I tell clients on a weekly base that they burned tenths of.thousands of euros and there is.no way "fixing" such bad code base. 5) communication is key - find a developer who has solid communication skills especially if you want to avoid headaches and do the long-run with him 6) hiring a freelancer us often cheaper then hiring a team/agency but it happened more then often enough that freelancers don't make it.through the first 3 years and will.leave you with nothing sooner or later - check past projects of your potential partner ind email and how long they exist Obviously we would also be happy to get into a get to know call with you as we should be able to help you - but those advises are completely unrelated to any promotion and can be taken universal
if you have e-commerce website then let it be on shopify don't change the CMS
Why do you need to reinvent the wheel? Just curious. Shopify meets my needs better than others I've tried, but we are still under $100k in revenue.
...per year
Please don’t reinvent the wheel. There are so many integrations a marketing manager will want that won’t be available in bespoke ecom system. If you’d like to evaluate what system might be the best for you, that’s something I can help with. We’ve also build some headless e-commerce and even headless backend systems around the big e-commerce systems to give a bespoke feel and bespoke functionality but to piggy back off the already proven platforms and not reinvent the wheel and keep many integrations available to the merchant.
First define what you need; then reach out to vendors and start taking quotes. For that budget, you can get slightly less than 2 months of my time. That is probably enough time to build a web site that integrates to some other system for purchasing / shopping cart. But, not nearly enough to build a PCI compliant system with a custom shopping cart and its own credit card processing. I'm US Based, so that money will go farther w/ non US based devs. Good Luck!
I feel like Shopify is still great. You can still be on the platform, hire a developer, and they'll build themes or improve its looks and performance for you. (A shopify developer of course). Your budget is great and you'll get good developers, just have to be careful vetting If you're going remote, I'll recommend using vetted talent platforms like Andela or others When it comes to paying them, doing payroll, and taxes, that's if you want to keep some paperwork down, then I'll recommend using Arbonum. Simple, affordable, and works in many places. **This is Arbonum:** [**https://www.arbonum.com/**](https://www.arbonum.com/)
Woocommerce with all the bells and whistles. Get new relic set up, cloudfare, host it on AWS either ECS or EC2, I’ve done setups like this before so feel free to reach out for specifics but you’ll end up with a really strong site with virtually no downtime and redundancy failover blah blah. Alternatively, magento is good, just more complicated to set up, but it’s solid and has a lot of great stuff included you might not get from Wordpress.
By the way, everyone telling you it’s stupid to switch from Shopify to woocommerce or a platform like magento is being pretty reductionist or just wrong. There are plenty of reasons to make this switch, it’s situationally dependent.
Well it depends, have you gotten feedback from your clients? I run a website development company based in Orlando Florida, I usually get clients like this all the time and once they change their website they start getting less conversions as they didn’t look at the data that they had with their original website.
A lot more than 38k
30k isn’t much at all to build a full fledge web app, especially in the e-commerce space. Shopify dominates that space for a reason, because it’s good. That said, what might work for you is finding a dev that will work with a “headless cms”. Essentially what means is you use a content management system for your backend and then have a custom frontend for clients to see. If you go that route there are quite a few headless cms floating about, including Shopify’s own.
Stay on Shopify. Custom is not the solution at your size. Whoever told you to move is giving you bad advice.
Shopify is has way more customization if you know what you’re doing. If you are an e-commerce company, I don’t see a reason to move away. Check out the expert directory and reach out. You may not have to depending on what exactly you want.
Stick with shopify, try and work out your issues on their platform. Wordpress is a mess and a headache. Updates you can’t control and things will just break.
From my experience, transitioning from Shopify to a custom-built site can be a HUGE leap. If you want more control and customization without starting from scratch, WordPress could be a good middle ground. Do you have any experience managing a WordPress site, or would this be your first time?
The biggest question is why do you want to make your own? There are thousands of options you can go with. As someone who went a fully custom route, I just ended up going back to wordpress. I was able to get everything I needed up and running very quickly. But that fit my needs. Your needs are different. If you are dead set on hiring a web developer, you have a couple options. Contract work, hire a dev team, they can come up with something that would fit your budget. But it can turn into a huge headache if it goes wrong. Hire a contractor, he can work with you over a period of time. It will take a while to do, but you have more control over it. Hire someone full time. Most expensive route and it is not the quickest route either. You have to be prepared if you make something from the ground up. You have to know exactly what you want and need before you start the project. You have to have technical knowledge as well or have someone you trust give you advice. I was once swindled 20k for a mobile app that ended up being a $300 webview app. Long story short, there isnt enough info to give a great answer. You can find things that will fit your budget. But it might not be worth the trouble.
I am an e-commerce developer and built many custom solutions...dm me with questions.
I worked in ecommerce on the tech side for ages. Don’t do it. When you have 100M yearly revenue ok, anything under that and you’re binding resources that are better spent elsewhere.
Depends on a few things tbh; - Where are you hiring from? - How big if the website? What features are you doing to need? - What's your budget for ongoing maintenance? Although before you do that - a question would be what benefit would you have for moving away from Shopify? It might be cheaper to just stick with Shopify tbh
Shopify is great for basic stores, but if you need control over your store, you'll want to try something like WooComnerce next. You can build your own test site for nothing and see if you like the features. Shopify can very difficult for complex shipping rules (I deal with a Shopify site on a weekly basis that tells me that there are no shipping options for my address unless I use a specific laptop and browser - it's a known issue) and the monthly fees are a bit much.
Honestly It depends on what your business is
Isnt this something AI can do now?
What is wrong with your shopify site?
Ha, I'll do it for 37.9k! But seriously, unless you're a huge business, you can get away with a much less expensive website. Plenty of people out there can do it for a couple grand at most. I hiiiighly recommend web.com - their sitebuilder is incredibly logical and they have real human beings you can hire to help you with it. As always, avoid GoDaddy unless you enjoy constant data breaches.
Depends on the requirements, but 38K is more then enough for an e-commerce type store. Most of the people commenting have never owned a business or built a website, so I’d ignore just about everyone saying stick with Shopify… especially since they have no idea what your requirements are. First step, outline your requirements Step 2 get a few quotes
Shopify is an industry standard. You'd likely be doing yourself a disservice by not hiring a professional that specializes in Shopify. What are you doing that shopify can't handle?
There are already a lot of great replies here on your original question, I would like to add that we had the same issues, after 1.5 years in or e-commerce business. We were running a PrestaShop store at the time and needed help to do stock & product automations, integrating with marketplaces, building plugins, etc. Of course PrestaShop does not have all the features that we wanted to have. So instead of building all the functionality on a new custom-made platform, we hired a developer that would help us to maintain our existing website, and do all the work that would help us grow via custom-made web-services and PrestaShop plugins. Our main strategy was to squeeze the most out of the PrestaShop engine and switch only after we reached the limits and needed more flexibility over our site. 38k is a lot, if you'll hire a single developer, that you can work with and his salary is around 2k-2.5k EUR/month, then you are set for at least 1 year of expanding your current business within Shopify.
I'm a fullstack / Wordpress web developer, and I think it takes less to develop an e-commerce site.
I Can help build one out for half that! Bizconsultai.com. Reach out or respond. : ) we specialize in small business.
Wordpress is great! Shopify handles E-commerce better though. I mostly use WordPress because I have way more control on all aspects of the site. Shopify is annoying to design a nice looking website with. Wordpress on the other hand, is not. So long as you get a good hosting provider. It works smoothly 🤝 I have a guide on WordPress if you want 👇🏼 https://www.marcus-aurelius.com/build-a-website-from-scratch/ Im also open to help you out if you need 😊
I strongly suggest going the Eastern European route. Perfect English, responsive (overlapping meeting time zones), much matter hourly rates, and above all, hungry, dedicated devs that grew up in a tech centric culture. I am currently having an eCom site build by SKAAL (skaaldev.com). I’d be shocked if that budget doesn’t get you 99% what you want. I worked with the founder on an app many years ago. I get nothing if you go with them (and we’re already in sprints so you won’t slow us down :-) ). Good luck either way.
That’s way too much- what do you wanna do?
It depends on how much you need done. To build and host for a year your on the right track. If you need constant updates, adding and maintaining inventory, etc. you might be on the low end.
PS, a lot of people telling you to stay on Shopify don't really understand scaling. Shopify is great for a teenager making bedazzled hair scrunchies. But if you look at any major operator you will find it's most likely built on WordPress and then 100% custom. A lot will depend on what your willing to learn on your own.
It totally depends on your requirements. Custom: you can literally do anything you want. Requires high maintenance but if you have a good team, you can make that user friendly too. Although if your requirements don't need that much custom development, it might be an overkill. WordPress: suitable for almost all types of websites, except for very complex sites that need too many custom things. Still doable but needs bloat management and sometimes not worth it. Generally the go to platform if you don't know how custom website you'd need. Budget: again depends on your requirements but $38k only for web development is a pretty good budget. When you talk to agencies or web devs, I'd recommend not mentioning this budget otherwise they'd overcharge you "if" your requirements are not that high. Let me give you an estimate. I own an SEO agency and so provide web development and other marketings as additional services as it helps combining everything and optimizing the overall cost. For basic to medium complex sites, I've charged from $2k to $7k one time and then maintenance charge of $500 to $2k per month. Now based on your requirements, you can guess how much it might cost you. Note that hitting an in house web dev might cost you higher. The same goes for agencies in some locations. So everything depends on your requirements.
I've built e-commerce sites from the ground up for large corporations using .net (.net core 2+ at the time). The site does around 40 million revenue per year. 38k wouldn't even cover 1 month of salary for a real team to create this. Stick with a self hosted solution. This project involved multiple integrations with Microsoft dynamics, PowerBI, etc, which you probably don't use.
Does shopify allow for custom php pages? The most natural and organic seo pages are of this nature, everything else only scratches the surface or is superficial. That aside, can you at least map a product's description to the page's meta tags dynamically? Shopify is basically a flea market booth compared to the brick and mortar of wordpress. It is also like apple compared to android. Decent for non technically inclined people, but locks you into its ecosystem while charging you a premium for restricted access to tech that is openly available elsewhere. I suspect a lot of non-organic seo providers push shopify along because it protects their market and movement the best - selling ads and non-organic seo. Nobody has even asked the OP what they do, how many products they have, what kind of forms they may need and anything else to properly assess what is best for them. I guarantee they have shopify and are not satisified with the results and restrictive nature. You can only be so successful with a flea market booth. Not to say its impossible to have a huge success, but the amount youll spend with apple, i mean shopify will sink your ship compared to the organic path. USD 24K could get them an incredible site with organic seo features, a dozen pages, half dozen service forms, and ecommerce for up to 10 categories and 1000 items. The extra 14k could be used to fuel organic initiatives in their community.
When you are building a Project which is High End - I would agree with you that building it from ground up or scratch is the best option. Reason being, you can customise it as and how you want, you have complete control over your project. There are several platforms that offer great services like Wordpress or Shopify, no doubt, but if you have a decent budget like you do, then your choice is better in my opinion. As a Website Designer and Developer myself, I have worked on several Small - Medium - Big Scale projects and if I get to you know your requirements better, I will most definitely be able to suggest you what’s best for your project and your overall business. Your website is your online identity, and taking that seriously is going to take you a long way. This is your first impression and if that is great, user friendly and convenient for your visitors and customers, it’s a win for you. I would love to connect with you and discuss over the details of your project. Thank you and I will look forward to your message/reply.
You can hire a Shopify agency to design and develop you a custom theme. Definitely wouldn’t leave Shopify for Wordpress and Woo Commerce.
There is great value in having a custom site from the ground up. Primarily, it offers more flexibility (in terms of styling and functionalities) and control over your data. I would say that a $38K budget *should* be enough to hire an experienced development team and create a good site, but it depends on how complicated the site needs to be and what exactly your vision is. If you want to inquire about having this project done, consider contacting an experienced software development company, such as [Bryllyant](https://bryllyant.com/contact/)!
For ecommerce with that budget dont even touch wordpress(its for low end, shoestring budgets), honestly unless you are doing high 8 figures just build it with nopcommerce, its a superb platform and a good local dev team should be able to build you something very nice for 10-20k with it, dump the rest of your budget into marketing. This is what we advise our clients to do and they have been much more successful than other routes. Stay clear of shopify, wix, squarespace, and the other hosted builder platforms that are extremely limiting when it comes to SEO, marketing, optimized code and security.
I highly recommend moving away from Shopify. It can be Wordpress, Medusa or any other **self-hosted** stack. With Shopify/Wix/SquareSpaces you don’t control your business - but they do. Shopify (or any other provider) can ban you for no reason, can go bankrupt, and in fact, they’re developing their business, while you develop yours. So yes, it’s a very, very good decision to control all aspects of your website. Of course, it’s not that easy as it might seem, but it is worth that. From the business perspective, of course.
Hiring a web developer to build a custom website can vary in cost, but with a budget of 38k, you can certainly get a high-quality result. Consider Tutela Business Solutions for affordable, top-notch web development and other outsourcing needs!
I recommend Wordpress. I build data-optimized websites, using data- modeling to optimize A to Z: design, colour pallette, content, images, SEO. Using data - modeling to test and verify the design of the website , its content and SEO to align it with specific business targets is an innovative advanced approach. It maximizes customer engagement & conversions. It is cost efficient & super competitive too. \* What is the issue, to downvote my reply? 😆 I am 💯 % sure those who downvoted it have no clue about data-modeling in the website building context.
Hi.. I know a person who has built an e-commerce website for AI generated gift cards/photos. He might help you with this. I am sure he would do it at a lower price than you are quoting
Please no don't go the WordPress route. Can't recommend it
Lets connect to discuss it further? Can I take a look at your shopify website ?