How much an online shop costs in 2026

For an online shop you will be quoted anything from €500 to €15,000 — and every quote will talk about “an online shop”. The gap is not greed, it is that fifteen different products hide behind the same word. Below is an honest breakdown, without the marketing fog.

The thing to grasp: with a website you pay for looks and content; with a shop you also pay for processes — payments, stock, delivery, tax, returns. It is exactly those processes, the ones a quote often leaves out, that set the price.

Bracket 1: €500–1,500 — a shop on an existing platform

A shop on Shopify or WooCommerce with an adapted template. It works, it has a basket and a checkout, and it looks like a few thousand others. Suitable when you have few products and are still testing the idea.

What the price usually excludes: writing the descriptions, product photography, entering the items, the delivery integration, and the monthly subscriptions for the platform and its plugins (which add up to hundreds over a year).

Bracket 2: €1,500–5,000 — a shop with a look of its own

Your own visual identity on a reliable platform, tidy categories, filters, integration with delivery and payments, basic SEO. This is the bracket where most serious shops sit comfortably.

Two questions matter here: who enters the products (with hundreds of items that is days of work) and who looks after the shop once it is live.

Bracket 3: €5,000 and up — the shop as a system

When the shop is no longer a catalogue but a tool wired into your business: stock synchronised with the warehouse, wholesale prices per customer, subscriptions, a link to accounting and ERP, feeds for marketplaces. The price here does not depend on the number of products but on the number of processes.

This bracket is for manufacturers and companies that already hold their data in other systems and must not enter everything twice. We wrote about that in from spreadsheets to a real database.

Six costs that quotes tend to leave out

• Entering products and writing descriptions. Sales copy is work; with a large catalogue it is the biggest hidden cost.
• Photography. Consistent, good product shots — stock will not stand in for them.
• The delivery integration (national post, GLS, DPD and the like) and printing labels.
• Payments. The provider (Stripe, for instance) takes around 1.5% per transaction.
• VAT and invoicing. Charging the right rate and issuing invoices, with fiscal receipts where they are required.
• Maintenance and security. Updates, backups, speed.

A cheap shop built on messy data inherits every one of its errors — and shows them to your customers.

Why the cheapest quote is often the dearest

A cheap shop as a rule has no sound technical basis for SEO, it is slow on a phone and it cannot sensibly be connected to your stock. When the business grows it has to be built again — and then you pay twice. A simple test: ask the supplier what happens when you want to add wholesale or another language. If the answer is “then we build a new one”, you know what you are buying.

What we do

We build shops in the second and third brackets — with a look of their own, connected to stock, payments and delivery, ready to grow. If a simple solution on a ready-made platform is enough to get you started, we will tell you so honestly, even when it means we do not build it.

Write and tell us how many products you have and whether you also sell to restaurants or retailers (wholesale). Those two facts alone already show which bracket makes sense for you.