Ask five agencies what an online store costs and you will get five numbers that are nowhere near each other. That is not because four of them are wrong. It is because “an online store” covers everything from a twenty-product shop on a monthly platform to a custom build wired into a warehouse system, and the quote follows the work, not the label.
This guide breaks the cost down into the parts that actually move it, so you can tell whether a quote is fair, what it leaves out, and what you will still be paying in year two.
The short answer
An ecommerce website has two costs: the build, which you pay once, and the running cost, which you pay every month for as long as the store exists. Most people compare the first and underestimate the second.
As one concrete reference point: our own online store builds start from €2,790 one-off, or from €290 a month with a year of maintenance and support included. Both are starting points, not packages. The exact figure depends on the factors below, and our pricing page lists what is included.
Why quotes differ by a factor of ten
Three stores can all be called “a small shop” and still be completely different jobs.
A store you set up yourself on a hosted platform. You pick a template, add products, connect payments. The cash cost is low; the cost in your own time is not. This works well for a small catalogue and simple shipping, and starts to strain when you need something the platform or its apps do not do.
A template store set up by a professional. The same kind of platform or a standard WooCommerce setup, but configured properly: payments, shipping rules, tax, legal pages, product data, basic SEO. This is where most small businesses sensibly start.
A custom-built store. Designed around your products and your customers, with integrations to accounting, stock or courier systems, and logic that off-the-shelf tools do not handle, such as trade pricing tiers, configurable products or subscriptions. Higher build cost, and usually a lower cost of working around limitations later.
Neither end is automatically right. The question is which set of constraints you actually have.
What drives the build cost
When we price a store, these are the questions that move the number most.
- How many products, and how complicated are they? Fifty simple products are a different job from two thousand products with sizes, colours and per-variant stock.
- Where does the product data come from? Typing it in, importing a clean spreadsheet, or syncing with a supplier feed are three very different amounts of work.
- How do people pay? Card payments are standard. Invoices for trade customers, cash on delivery, instalments or several currencies each add setup and testing.
- How is it shipped? A flat rate is simple. Rates by weight, zone and courier, with labels generated automatically, are not.
- What does it need to talk to? Accounting software, a stock system, a CRM, a marketplace. Each integration is a small project with its own testing.
- How many languages and markets? Every extra language multiplies content and adds tax and shipping questions.
- Design: theme or bespoke? A well-configured theme is cheaper. Bespoke design costs more and pays back when the brand and conversion rate matter.
- Is it a new store or a migration? Moving an existing store means carrying over products, customers, order history and URLs without losing search rankings. Migrations are often underestimated.
What you keep paying after launch
This is the side of the budget people remember in month three.
- Platform subscription, if you are on a hosted platform. Plans and prices change, so check the current figures on the platform’s own page, for example Shopify’s pricing.
- Payment processing fees. A percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction, charged by the payment provider. On some platforms there is an additional fee if you use a payment provider other than theirs.
- Apps and extensions. Reviews, subscriptions, advanced filters, shipping labels. Each is usually a small monthly fee, and a typical store collects more of them than planned.
- Hosting, if you run WooCommerce or another self-hosted system. Cheap hosting is fine until your traffic grows, which is exactly when you can least afford it to slow down.
- Domain and email. Small, but recurring.
- Maintenance and security. Updates, backups, monitoring. On a self-hosted store this is not optional.
- Small changes. A new category, a banner, a changed shipping rule. If you cannot do them yourself, they add up across a year.
We broke the recurring side down line by line in what a website really costs per year.
One-off or monthly?
Some agencies, including us, offer both. One-off means you pay for the build up front and then maintenance separately. Monthly spreads the build across a fixed term and bundles maintenance and support into the same payment.
Neither is cheaper by default. Monthly suits businesses that would rather keep cash in stock and marketing, and that want one number to budget for. One-off suits businesses that prefer to own the cost outright and handle maintenance their own way. Whichever you choose, check who owns the domain, the hosting account and the code at the end of the term. We covered that in who actually owns your website.
Costs that are not in most quotes
These are the items that turn a sensible budget into an uncomfortable one, mostly because nobody wrote them down.
- Product photography. Manufacturer images are fine for some products and useless for others. Good photos are often the single biggest improvement to conversion.
- Product copy. Pasted manufacturer text is the same as on every competitor’s site. Writing your own takes time or money.
- Legal pages. Terms of sale, returns, privacy and cookies need to match how you actually operate, and for UK sellers, how you handle VAT.
- Redirects on migration. Skipping them is how stores lose half their search traffic the week they relaunch.
- Your own time. Loading products, answering setup questions, testing. Budget it.
When cheap is the right answer
If you are testing whether a product sells at all, with a handful of items and simple shipping, spending heavily on a custom store is a mistake. Start small on a hosted platform, learn what your customers actually do, and invest once you know.
Cheap becomes expensive when the store is already your main sales channel and the limits of a basic setup start costing orders: a checkout you cannot adjust, stock that is wrong because nothing syncs, an app stack that breaks after every update. At that point the rebuild you avoided is cheaper than the sales you are losing. If that sounds familiar, read five signs you have outgrown your setup.
How to compare quotes properly
Put every quote through the same questions. If a supplier cannot answer them clearly, that tells you something too.
- What exactly is included: how many products loaded, which payment methods, which shipping rules?
- Is design bespoke or a configured theme?
- What happens to my existing URLs and rankings, if this is a migration?
- What will I pay every month after launch, in total, including apps and fees?
- Who handles updates and backups, and what does that cost?
- Who owns the domain, hosting and code?
- How are changes after launch charged?
Two quotes that answer these the same way are comparable. Two that do not are not, however similar the headline figure looks.
Common questions
Is Shopify cheaper than WooCommerce?
Usually cheaper to start and not always cheaper to run. The comparison depends on your transaction volume, the apps you need and who maintains a self-hosted store. We went through it in Shopify vs WooCommerce and WordPress or Shopify.
How long does a store take to build?
A properly configured template store takes a few weeks, mostly spent on product data and testing. A custom store with integrations takes longer, and the timeline is usually set by how quickly content and decisions arrive, not by the build itself.
Can I add features later instead of paying for them now?
Most features, yes. The exceptions are structural choices such as the platform, the URL structure and how products and variants are modelled. Those are cheap to get right at the start and expensive to change later.
What is the most common budgeting mistake?
Comparing launch costs and ignoring the twelve-month total. The second most common is not budgeting for anything after launch at all. Our list of online store mistakes covers the rest.
Next step
If you would like a figure for your store rather than a range, request an estimate. Tell us roughly how many products you have, how you ship and what the store needs to connect to, and we will come back with a number and a list of what it includes.