How much does an ecommerce website cost?

An ecommerce website has more moving parts than a simple brochure site, so the price range is wider: anything from a few hundred pounds on a template to well into six figures for a complex, custom store. Here is what actually drives the number, and how to think about your budget.

The price is set by a handful of things: how many products you have and how complex they are, with variants and subscriptions adding cost; whether the store is a template or a bespoke design; whether brand and photography are included or you bring them; the integrations you need for payment, shipping, stock and CRM; and, crucially, how much of the work goes into conversion rather than just looking nice.

At the DIY end, a Shopify or Wix theme costs from nothing to around a thousand pounds plus a monthly fee, and you build it yourself. It is a viable way to start, but it looks like the theme and rarely converts as well as it could. A capable freelancer, roughly £2,000 to £6,000, will set up Shopify with a customised theme, which suits a straightforward catalogue. A studio, from around £9,000 into the low tens of thousands, brings considered brand and design, a properly built store, and real work on the product page and checkout. Enterprise and fully custom builds start higher again.

The platform itself is rarely where the cost sits. Shopify covers most businesses well and keeps running costs sane, and while we are platform-agnostic, we recommend it for most. What you are really paying for is the design and the conversion work, not the software.

The homepage rarely decides a sale. The product page and the checkout do, and that is where the budget should go.

That work earns its keep in specific places. Not the homepage, but the product page, the path to checkout, and the reasons to come back. A store that looks lovely but converts at one percent instead of two and a half is leaving most of its revenue on the table, quietly, every day.

This is where cheap gets expensive. A low-cost store that does not convert is a slow leak. Every visitor it fails to turn into a sale is a cost that never shows up on the invoice, and it compounds with every pound you spend driving traffic to it.

The sensible way to budget is as a share of the revenue the store should generate, not as a flat cost. A shop that will do six figures a year justifies a very different investment from a weekend side project, and pretending otherwise usually means underbuilding the thing that is meant to make you money.

The honest route to a real number is a short conversation about your products, your volumes and your goals. Tell us what you sell and we will tell you what it would take to sell more of it.