How Much Does an Online Store Cost? Real Prices for Each Route

01.Why “how much does an online store cost” has three answers

When we wrote about how much a presentation website costs, the answer ran on a single scale. Stores are different, because the real question is double: what you build it on, and who builds it. The same platform can mean a 30-euro monthly subscription if you set it up yourself, or a few thousand euros if you want a store designed around your brand, with payments, invoicing, and shipping wired correctly. And above both sits the custom world, where you're no longer buying a template but software built for your business. Three routes, three price bands.

02.Route 1: on a platform, built by you

The lowest upfront cost: the platform subscription, around 30 to 100 euros a month on Shopify, a theme that's free or somewhere around 100-300 euros, plus your time. On paper, you have a store for a few hundred euros.

In practice this band has two limits. The first is time: configuring payments, shipping, invoicing for your country (it doesn't come out of the box), photos, product copy, legal pages. All learnable, but the hours add up, and your hours have a cost even when no invoice shows it. The second is the ceiling: a store on a standard theme looks like thousands of other stores on that theme, and when something breaks, you're your own support line.

It's a good route if you're testing an idea, have few products, and close to zero budget. Many stores start here, and it's an honest start.

03.Route 2: on a platform, built by a studio

The middle band, and the most commonly bought: the turnkey store. Roughly 1,500 to 6,000 euros for a store on Shopify or WooCommerce, depending on how much brand-specific design you want, how many products launch on day one, and how many integrations come in: payments, couriers, invoicing, sometimes stock.

What you actually pay for in this band: the design that stops you looking like a template, a category structure built around how people search, payments and shipping configured correctly for your market, invoicing connected, products loaded cleanly, and someone handing you a working store with training at the end. The difference between 1,500 and 6,000 almost always sits in the volume of custom design and the number of integrations. On choosing the platform itself, we wrote a full guide in the platform guide.

04.Route 3: custom, when the store is the business

From around 10,000 euros up, often well beyond. Here you're not buying a store on a platform anymore; you're buying a software product: a checkout shaped to your flow, pricing or subscription logic platforms don't cover, deep integration with your systems. We described the logic of a build this size in what goes into a five-figure website, and what owning what you build means in custom website or platform.

The honest sign you need custom: you've tried the platforms and hit their limits month after month. If you haven't hit them yet, you almost certainly don't need this band.

05.The monthly costs quotes leave out

This is where the difference hides between “what it costs to build” and “what it costs to have.” An online store has running costs, whatever the route:

• The platform subscription. Around 30-100 euros a month on Shopify; on WooCommerce you don't pay for the platform, but you pay hosting and the maintenance of updates.
• Payment fees. The payment processor keeps a cut of every transaction, typically around 2-3% plus a fixed amount. At volume, this becomes your biggest monthly cost.
• Apps and extensions. Reviews, email marketing, bundles: many bill monthly and add up quietly.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, small fixes. Mandatory on WooCommerce; largely included in the platform on Shopify.
• Marketing. A store without traffic is a warehouse with the door shut. The ads or SEO budget sits outside the store's cost, but without it the numbers don't come.

The practical rule: for a small store, budget a few tens to a few hundred euros a month in running costs, before marketing. Anyone selling you a store without saying this is selling you half the story.

06.What moves the price up or down

A few factors make the difference on any route:

• Product count and variations. Twenty simple products and five hundred with sizes and colors are different projects.
• Integrations. Local invoicing, couriers, stock synced with your inventory system: every connection adds time.
• Custom design. The less you want to look like a template, the higher the price, and it's usually worth exactly as much as your brand sells.
• Migration. Coming from another store with product and order history, a clean move is real work.
• Content. Who writes the product copy and shoots the photos? If it's the studio, you see it in the price; if it's you, you see it in your calendar.

07.How to compare two offers

The same discipline we recommended in how much an app costs: ask for offers structured the same way, otherwise you're comparing apples with pears.

• What's included and what isn't: design, products loaded, integrations, training.
• Which platform, and why that one for your case.
• Which monthly costs follow after launch, all of them.
• Who handles maintenance and at what cost.
• What happens if you leave: do you keep your data and your domain?

The visibly cheaper offer is, most of the time, the offer with lines missing. Ask exactly which lines, and the price difference suddenly makes sense.

08.What we usually recommend

For a new store we usually start from Shopify: a mature platform with payments and hosting solved, on which we build the design and configuration around your brand. WooCommerce makes sense when you already run a WordPress site and want to add selling to it. Custom we recommend only when you've outgrown the platforms, with concrete reasons, because that's when the money actually buys something a platform can't do. If you want a number for your situation, we look at products, integrations, and brand, then give you a clear staged quote.

09.Closing

“How much does an online store cost” has three answers, but the question behind them is a single one: how much of your selling depends on it? A store that brings orders every day pays for its build many times over. A cheaply made one that loses customers at checkout is expensive at any price.