How much does an online shop cost?

These are my own prices for a custom online shop — a store designed and written from scratch for your business. They are not market averages, and they exclude VAT.

The prices at a glance

For a simple website the price moves with how demanding the design is. For a shop it moves mainly with the integrations you need. The table excludes VAT.

What a €3,000 shop includes

• Categories built your way. The catalogue follows how your business actually works, and you change the categories yourself.
• Dynamic filters. You decide which filters a customer sees and in what form: options, grouped options, colours.
• Online payments. The customer pays in the shop and the order is recorded automatically.
• Stock. The shop tracks warehouse stock, so you never sell something you don't have.
• An admin area. Simple, built for your work, so you can set it up the way that suits you.
• Designed from scratch. No off-the-shelf theme: fast pages and a sound basis for Google.

What pushes the cost to €5,000–€7,000

Two things: automatic product imports from your suppliers, and the ERP connection. Both cost money up front and save work every single day.

Automatic product imports from supplier XML feeds

Many suppliers and wholesalers give their partners an XML file containing their whole catalogue: codes, titles, descriptions, photos, prices and availability. A script reads that file automatically — every night, for example — and:

• creates the products that aren't in the shop yet,
• updates prices and availability on the ones that are,
• hides the ones the supplier no longer carries.

Every supplier has their own file format and their own categories, so the script is written separately for each one: it maps their categories onto yours and works out the selling price with the rules you set, such as a margin per category.

How much time it saves on a new shop. Entering one product by hand means a title, a description, photos, attributes, a price and a category. At five minutes each, 2.000 products take roughly 170 hours — a month of work for one person. With the script the same catalogue lands the same day, and the shop opens with its full range.

The bigger win comes afterwards. Supplier prices and stock change constantly. Without automatic updates someone has to correct them by hand, or the shop sells products that don't exist, at last month's price.

The ERP connection

An ERP is the software a business runs its warehouse, price lists and invoicing on. When the shop talks to it:

• products, prices and stock come from the ERP, so the shop and the physical store always show the same availability,
• every order placed in the shop flows into the ERP, ready to invoice.

Without the connection, every order is entered twice and every price change is made in two places. The more orders you take, the more time is lost and the easier mistakes become.

What the connection costs depends on which ERP you have and on how it lets other software talk to it.

Why custom rather than an off-the-shelf theme

For €3,000 you get something an off-the-shelf theme cannot give you: a shop that loads only what it uses. A theme sold to thousands of stores carries code for features you don't have — a slider, a page builder, five product-page layouts — and ships it to your customer's browser even where it isn't needed. On top of that comes a file for every plugin. You pay for it in mobile speed, and speed matters both to Google and, more directly, to sales.

You also gain three things that have nothing to do with speed: you don't look like anyone else, the design follows your products instead of you adapting to it, and you aren't maintaining a stack of plugins that all have to stay compatible with each other.

That doesn't make a theme always wrong. If you sell a handful of products, with no variants, no suppliers and no warehouse to sync, and you want to find out first whether the idea sells, an off-the-shelf store is a perfectly good first step — and I have recommended it.

I go through the comparison with numbers in its own guide: Custom online shop or WooCommerce/Shopify?

Two shops I have built

Egli: the product code tells you what the product is

Egli sells linens, rugs and homeware. There, each product code is built from the supplier, the category and the product's main filters. The person managing the shop sees a code and knows immediately what they are looking at. On a ready-made platform the code is just a field somebody types in by hand.

See the Egli project

Techlamb: filters the shop owner sets up

Techlamb sells computers, components and spare parts. Its filters are fully dynamic: plain checkboxes, nested checkboxes, single choice and colours. The shop owner configures them from the admin area, the way it suits them. Both of the things that push the price up are running there: products arrive from supplier XML feeds, and the shop talks to the client's ERP.

See the TechLamb project

What you pay after launch

The build is paid once. After that, a custom shop has few fixed costs:

• Hosting and the domain.
• Payment fees. Your payment provider or bank takes a percentage of each card transaction.
• Changes and new features, when you need them.

There is no monthly platform subscription, and no yearly licences for a theme and its plugins.