How much does an ecommerce website cost?

Here is the short answer. As a rough guide to the UK market, a simple template store runs from almost nothing to a couple of thousand pounds, a freelancer-built Shopify store from around £2,000 to £6,000, a studio-built store from around £9,000 into the low tens of thousands, and large or fully custom builds higher again. Those are market ranges, not quotes, and the rest of this explains what moves you up and down them, and what the store costs to run once it is live.

The number is set by a handful of things: how many products you have and how complex they are, with variants, bundles and subscriptions all adding cost; whether the store uses a template or a bespoke design; whether brand and photography are included or you bring your own; the integrations you need for payment, shipping, stock and your accounts; and, most of all, how much of the work goes into converting visitors rather than just looking good.

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, very 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.

Most of that is a choice between a platform store, usually Shopify, and a bespoke build. Shopify is the right answer for the large majority of businesses: it is reliable, it scales, the checkout is strong, and it keeps the running costs and the security burden sane. A fully bespoke build only earns its extra cost when you have genuinely unusual requirements a platform cannot meet. For most shops the smart money goes on design and conversion on Shopify, not on reinventing the plumbing.

Because the platform is rarely where the cost sits. What you are really paying for is the design and the conversion work, and that 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.

There are platform and integration costs to plan for too. The platform has a monthly fee, payment providers take a small percentage of each sale, and most stores add a few apps for things like reviews, email, subscriptions or shipping, each with its own monthly cost. Connecting the store to your stock system, your accounts such as Xero, or a CRM is usually worth it, but it is a line in the budget, not a free switch.

The build is not the end of the spending. A store needs hosting or a platform subscription, app fees, occasional fixes, and someone keeping it fast, secure and current. Budgeting for the build and forgetting the running costs is one of the most common mistakes, and it is how good stores quietly fall into disrepair. Treat ongoing care as part of the cost of owning a shop, because it is.

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

If you are moving an existing store to a new platform, add migration to the budget. Products, customers and orders have to move across cleanly, and every old web address needs a redirect to its new home, or you lose the search rankings you have already earned. Done carelessly a migration is painful; done properly it is smooth, and the shop that emerges is better for it.

Agency, studio or freelancer is a real decision, not just a price point. A freelancer is cheaper and can be excellent for a contained brief, but you are buying one person's time and availability. A studio costs more and brings strategy, design, build and conversion thinking together, with more cover and continuity. The right choice depends on how much the store matters to the business, and how much you want to manage yourself.

The expensive mistakes are consistent: buying on headline price alone; underbuilding the one thing meant to make money; skipping the conversion work to save a few thousand, then paying for it in lost sales; and forgetting the running costs. A cheap store that does not convert is a slow leak, and it compounds with every pound you spend driving traffic to it.

A couple of examples of the studio tier in practice. For Crafted, a design-led jewellery brand, we handled a full rebrand and a ground-up ecommerce redesign built on Shopify with a specialist development partner. For Strada Apparel, a young fashion house, we built the brand and the ecommerce experience from the logo through to the shape of the range. Both are the kind of considered, conversion-focused build that sits in the studio range above, rather than a template.

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.