A Cheap Website or E-shop and How It Will Lead You to Failure

Building a cheap website or a cheap e-shop is guaranteed to lead you to failure. Of course, building an expensive e-shop won’t guarantee success either, but in this article you will see why you are bound to fail spectacularly with a cheap online shop. We won’t even bother repeating the classic saying, which is right more often than not these days: “you get what you pay for”!

Exceptions where a low build cost makes sense

• A website or e-shop built by a relative
• A website or e-shop built by a friend (who really knows what they are doing)
• A website or e-shop built at that price by a new professional who knows the job but wants to build up their portfolio (of course, in this case they will be learning on your e-shop).

In our personal opinion, there are no other cases that justify a low price for a website or e-shop and still give you the right result.

What is the right price for a website?

Websites aren’t oranges, where we can say that 1 kilo costs about 1 euro. Even the amounts we mention above, for example €600 to build a website, can be too much if it was built by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing or has no plan.

Even €300 can be too much if someone builds a site that doesn’t properly do the job it is meant for. Not every site is meant to bring customers to the business. Some may simply be there to inform, for example so that people who look for us online can find us.

Also, the amount we mentioned above does not cover custom code or a very demanding e-shop or website. Whether youneed custom code or not is something you can read about in another of our articles. The amount we mentioned applies to someone who initially wants to get into e-commerce without very high demands and then gradually add budget to the solution.

Even when a website is built from a template (the cheapest option), the developer needs to know which one to choose and not pick one at random.

Many colleagues might say that even €3,000 is too little to build a website, but here too we would say that everything depends on the client’s requirements, the project we want to deliver and the competition. To be more specific, a website for an association that covers the association’s affairs and is mostly visited only by its members has no reason to cost more than €700 (always depending on its features, of course).

What harm does a badly built website do?

Rushed or poor work on your website or e-shop causes the following problems

• Customers won’t buy from an e-shop for quite some time if it is badly built and doesn’t work, because they lose trust
• Existing customers who visit your website will form a bad impression of your business
• You will lose new customers, meaning money that will go to another business and help your competitor grow.
• The most important problem is the lack of trust it creates, which is much harder to win back afterwards.

That’s why building your website or e-shop should be part of a wider branding strategy for your business, to strengthen trust in it and make it better known.

What does a properly built website or e-shop look like?

For the build of our website or e-shop to be right, the following need to be in place:

• It should load fast on both desktop computers and mobile
• It should have a good-looking, pleasant design (without being complicated)
• It shouldn’t tire the user, meaning it should offer a good user experience
• It should have the basics of on-page SEO (website promotion)
• It should provide all the information it needs to, according to the reason it was built

None of this is subjective: it is practical and it can be measured. For example, there are tools that measure your website’s speed . There are rules for keeping the user experience right. Even with design, you could simply show your page to 40 people and have them tell you with a yes or no whether they like it (everyone will always find flaws).

So why will a cheap website definitely fail?

Every day we get emails from people who built their website or e-shop for €300–500, or even by themselves, and ask us for social media advertising, advertising on Google Ads or search engine optimisation .

As soon as we tell them the cost of advertising (our fee plus the minimum budget they need to set aside), 80% of them never reply.

This happens because when you have paid €500 to build an e-shop, you aren’t ready to spend a total of €500–700 a month on advertising (which is definitely too little for competitive sectors). You aren’t ready to pay €2,000–3,000 for SEO. You aren’t ready to pay €400 to make your website faster (depending on how it was built, and whether it can be made faster at all). You aren’t ready to pay someone to manage your social media.

And all of the above has to be done if you want any hope of succeeding online. We all focus on the fact that we will now be reaching a very large audience (either the whole of Greece or the whole planet), and we forget that our competition will no longer be the shop across the road. It will be all the big businesses.

Is there no way to succeed without money?

Of course, nobody can compete with the giants of their sector on advertising budget. With smart ad targeting, smart ads and a sound overall strategy, though, you can succeed. We are talking about a smaller budget here, of course, not a non-existent one. If we want to spend next to nothing, the e-shop owner needs to have the knowledge and put in the time. So it comes down to either more time (as long as there is knowledge and a strategy) or more money.

The developer of cheap online solutions

Leaving aside that someone who offers cheap solutions doesn’t respect themselves or their work (what counts is the time it took to learn how to build something, as well as the time spent building it), they don’t respect their client either, because 99% of the time they will deliver something low-spec.

To put it more simply: we don’t pay a doctor for the hours an operation takes, we pay for the years they spent specialising so they can perform it. The same goes for building websites.

It is also obvious that such a developer doesn’t know what it takes to do the job properly, because even for WordPress websites, there are essential tools that you have to pay for.

Finally, whoever builds these solutions will never be able to solve a problem you run into or meet a new requirement if your business grows (growth that won’t come from a well-built site, but perhaps from your own promotional efforts).

So should we pay a lot for websites and e-shops?

We would never say you should pay a lot for a website or an e-shop. Look at what you are being offered (for example, customising a template can’t cost €4,000). An e-shop may well be worth €10,000 or more if, for example, it is connected to an ERP or the developers enter all the products and do a photo shoot for you, but that is far too much just to build a simple e-shop. Of course, it’s a free market, and everyone sets and chooses the price they want.

Why failure is certain

Competition is fierce these days and, as in any line of work, the professional who does the job properly for you wants to be paid. The same goes for advertising and website development, where the people who know how to build something and advertise it cost more than those who lack the knowledge or are just starting out.

To give you an even simpler example: you are going to run a race. If someone is driving a Ferrari (meaning they advertise properly with a big budget and have a well-built e-shop) and you turn up in a Fiat Punto (a badly built e-shop and a very small ad budget), the odds are not in your favour (unexpected things can always happen, but 9 times out of 10 the Ferrari will win).

The same will happen if you go ahead and build a cheap e-shop or website: in all likelihood you will fail, because you haven’t really made the decision to invest in a very competitive sector.