Our website cost €80 | Minimalism Brand Technology

You have asked us these three questions privately several times and today we bring the answer:

-With what platform have you made the web?

-How much did it cost you?

-What technology does the project carry?

In this post we will give you an answer to everything explaining what technology we use and have used, we will do it from minute zero until today. Commenting on the pros and cons of each of the platforms we've been through.

As you will see everything, from minute 1 it has a lot of common sense, some will use the term "Lean" which is prettier 😉 for us it is common sense, trial and error.

In the first place, to make it clear that our company does not have a CTO , and at the moment we do not believe that it will have one, we are a single-product ecommerce that seeks to create a long-term brand by linking the term minimalism to all our products, it is not a SAS, it is a pure ecommerce.

Starting from that base, we started our project without the need for a very strong technological development, and therefore, a strong investment was not necessary either.

We opted for a very simple wocommerce with three pages and a contact page. A web, clean, agile, without chaff, with good photos and with a very, very simple purchase process.

How did we do it and at what cost?

Pepe , one of the partners has a small marketing agency, Betheclient, where they make websites, branding and content. Then the cost of developing the website was the hours spent developing it, without outsourcing the design, all "in house". We only had to pay hosting + domain. And we did it with your regular provider, Siteground . Cost, until now less than €100 VAT included.

As the orders were coming in, we saw several limitations that woocommerce has:

Although it is ideal for few sales, it is not so friendly to measure, extract and analyze data, when the number of orders increases.

Here we found some more limitation at the security level. Wordpress is a secure platform but it has some gaps that we couldn't fill if we didn't hire someone who knows about systems, security, attacks... and a long etcetera that they told us in a meeting in which we understood practically nothing. If we hired this person, we incurred fixed expenses that we did not want to assume. It was clear that it was not the best option.

We always had the possibility of migrating to Shopify in our minds, we met with several companies using this tool and we knew that it was possibly what we were looking for. But the trigger and the decision-making did not come until with the FREEHOY promotion, the server crashed 3 times and the payment gateway was blocked, due to fraudulent activity. If Stripe cuts you off if you reach €3,000 in one day until you explain what you're doing.

Here we began to do the math, the cost we had with wocommerce was €100 + some plugins for downloading data, let's say a total of €150 per year.

Compared to shopify, €23 per month + commission for each sale, shopify keeps it, they are in the stock market for something, + the cost of the Stripe payment gateway (although we already had this in wp too).

With shopify we took away a possible important expense, a person responsible for technology, they are the ones who size the servers based on traffic and prove that your website is available 99% of the time, they are not bad data.

In summary, if we take accounts, fixed expenses:

• WordPress cost: €150/year
• Cost of wordpress + employee = €150 year + 700 (part-time or freelance integrated into the team, it is approximate) month. = 8400 + 150 = € 8550 / year
• shopify cost= 23€/month= 276€/year

Variables:

• For Wordpress only stripe commission 1.4%. *Stripe prices
• For Shopify= 2%*sales volume + stripe commission. *shopify prices

The operation is the same as with wordpress, you buy a template, which must be well adjusted to your project, image, design, etc... and you can complement it with almost any App (the same as wp plugins) that allow almost any stuff.

The cost, if you go to an external company to set up a shopify is higher than to set up a wordpress but we, too, could assume it at "home".

Some negative thing has shopify:

- The blog is not as modular as we would like, for example it does not allow you to manage comments, no joke.

- It does not have its own mail servers.

- Updates take time to arrive: Each step they take is slow and they do it first in the US and then come to Europe. For example, they have released the integration with Amazon a few weeks ago, we will see how long it takes to reach Spain.

Our shopify is something simple and in continuous growth, we are, every day, investigating what works and what doesn't, testing APPs, landings, promotions... we are not experts, we just investigate, test and collect data, as I was saying before, We apply common sense whenever we can.

The summary, and based on our experience: if you are going to set up an ecommerce, test the viability of the project with a simple woocommerce. If it works you can go to shopify , magento or do something custom.

Of course, the most important thing we have learned from other ecommerce is that the platform may be the least of it. As long as you sell, the client does not get lost, be agile and effective, the simple thing you already have done. The important thing is what you offer your customer when they make the purchase. Why does he buy from you? experience, price, money for value, manufacturing...

That your platform functions is easy, that the client buys from you and feels something when placing the order or when receiving their package is different and, to achieve all this, we continue working ;)

And you, ecommerce of the world, what steps have you followed?

Any questions we are at hola@minimalism.es