How Much Does an Online Store Cost?
What drives the cost of an e-commerce build — catalogue complexity, integrations, migration and operations — plus the recurring costs that outlast the project.
An online store on a hosted platform can be live in a weekend. A store that fits an existing business — with its pricing rules, its ERP, its shipping arrangements and its actual catalogue — is a project. The gap between those two is where most of the budget conversation happens.
What moves the number
Catalogue size and messiness
Fifty products with clean data is a different job from 12,000 products arriving as a supplier CSV with inconsistent attributes and no images. Data preparation is frequently the largest single task in an e-commerce build, and it’s the one nobody budgets for.
Ask yourself: where does product data live today, who maintains it, and how many places would have to be updated to change one price? If the answer is "three", the integration work is part of the project whether or not it’s in the quote.
Pricing and customer rules
Consumer retail with one price per product is straightforward. Add customer-specific pricing, volume breaks, B2B accounts with credit terms, regional VAT rules or bundles, and you’re building business logic rather than configuring a store.
Integrations
The usual suspects: ERP or accounting, warehouse or fulfilment, carriers and labels, payment providers, invoicing, marketing tools, and marketplaces. Each is a piece of work with its own failure modes. Two integrations is a normal store. Six is a systems project.
Migration
If you already have a store, you’re moving products, customers, order history and content — and mapping every old URL to a new one. Migrations done properly protect the search traffic you already have. Done badly they’re the most expensive way to lose it.
Design
A well-adapted theme is a perfectly good answer for many businesses. Custom design earns its cost when the brand is a differentiator or when your merchandising doesn’t fit standard layouts.
Rough shapes
| Store type | Typical characteristics | Relative effort |
|---|---|---|
| Platform store, theme | Small catalogue, standard checkout, no integrations | Smallest |
| Platform store, customised | Adapted theme, 1–2 integrations, structured product data | Small–medium |
| Headless storefront | Custom front end on a commerce backend, performance-led | Medium |
| B2B or complex catalogue | Account pricing, ERP sync, large catalogue | Large |
| Custom commerce | Unusual rules the platforms can’t express | Largest |
The costs that come after
- Transaction and platform fees. On a growing store these eventually exceed the build cost. Model them at your expected volume before choosing a platform.
- Payment processing. Small percentages, large numbers.
- Apps and plugins. Individually cheap, collectively a monthly line item worth auditing.
- Content. Product photography and descriptions, forever.
- Operations. Someone processes the orders, handles returns and answers "where is my parcel". Automating this is often a better investment than another design refresh.
- Maintenance. Platform updates, dependency upgrades, integration changes when a provider updates their API.
Where stores waste money
Buying custom too early. If your rules are conventional, a platform is faster and cheaper, and there’s no prize for building checkout from scratch.
Buying platform too late. The mirror image: staying on a hosted platform long after your pricing logic has become a maze of apps and workarounds costs more in operational friction than a rebuild would.
Skipping the operations. A store that sells well but takes four hours a day to run is a problem that grows exactly as fast as your success.
Ignoring performance. Slow product pages cost conversion every day, quietly. It never generates a complaint; it just shows up as a number that could have been better.
How to get a comparable quote
Give every supplier the same brief:
- The real catalogue — a sample export, not a description.
- The systems it must talk to, with links to their API docs.
- Your pricing rules, including the awkward exceptions.
- Your current traffic and order volume.
- Who will run the store day to day.
Quotes based on a description of a store are guesses. Quotes based on a sample export and an integration list are estimates.
If you’d like ours, tell us what you’re selling and to whom — or read how we approach e-commerce projects first.
Marta Szymczak
Sales & Key Account Manager
Your point of contact for everything commercial — scope, communication and making sure the project matches what the business actually needs.
More about the team