Ecommerce website cost: what stores pay, and who says so.

An ecommerce website costs anything from a $29-a-month platform plan to six figures for a custom build with integrations. As of October 16, 2026, Shopify and BigCommerce list their entry plans at $29 a month billed yearly. SmartSites says a new Shopify store starts at $10,000. ScienceSoft lists builds from $25,000, and from $200,000 for large businesses with integrations.

Last reviewed October 16, 2026. Every figure below links to whoever published it, and we read every source that day.

This ecommerce website cost guide is for merchants pricing a first store, a rebuild or a replatform. It keeps the prices vendors publish, which you can check and pay, apart from the estimates agencies and surveys publish, which describe other people's projects. Then it shows what makes two quotes for the same store so far apart.

Ecommerce website cost at a glance#

How much does an ecommerce website cost? Three layers make up the number: the platform you run on, the build that turns it into your store, and the running costs that start at launch and never stop.

Ecommerce website pricing mixes two kinds of figure, and the table keeps them apart:

• Published by the vendor. Figures from the vendor's own page. The plan and fee rows are list prices you can check and would pay; the one estimate is marked.
• Published by agencies and surveys. Each agency's figures for its own projects, plus two surveys. Useful as a range, but they describe other stores, not yours.

Each row also says whether the cost is one-time, recurring or charged per transaction.

Two readings stand out. The plan prices match: Shopify and BigCommerce list the same $29, $79 and $299 a month, billed yearly, for their first three plans. The terms don't: BigCommerce ties each plan to your trailing-12-month sales. The build estimates run from $5,000 for a SmartSites retheme to $200,000 and up for ScienceSoft's large-business tier, a forty-fold spread, which is why most of this guide is about what moves a store along that range.

The payment rows grow with every order, and on BigCommerce so does the plan. Some costs have no row, because none of these sources puts a price on them: product content and photography, data cleanup, and the hours your own team spends deciding, writing and testing. They still land on someone's invoice or someone's calendar, and the cost drivers below show how to count them.

Platform fees: what the vendors publish#

What does the platform itself cost each month? The plan fee is the easy part. The fee that gets missed sits further down each pricing page: the one for using a payment provider the platform doesn't favor. As of October 16, 2026, Shopify charges 2% per transaction on Basic when you use a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments, falling to 0.2% on Plus. BigCommerce charges an Open Payment Provider Fee of 2.0% on Core, on GMV processed through any provider outside its embedded list. Both come on top of what your processor charges.

Shopify and Shopify Plus#

Shopify's pricing page lists Basic at $29 a month billed yearly or $39 billed monthly, Grow at $79 or $105, and Advanced at $299 or $399. Shopify Plus starts at $2,500 a month on a one-year term or $2,300 on a three-year term. More complex, higher-volume businesses "switch to a variable platform fee based on their revenue and business model," and Shopify publishes no rate for it. The Plus fee covers your main store and 9 expansion stores, for one brand per contract.

BigCommerce#

BigCommerce ties each plan to your sales. Core is $29 a month billed annually ($39 monthly) up to $30K of trailing-12-month GMV, Growth is $79 ($105) up to $100K, and Scale is $299 ($399) with a $33,333 monthly GMV cap. Pass the Core or Growth cap and the plan upgrades itself. On Scale, GMV above the cap pays a 0.9% overage until trailing-12-month GMV reaches $2 million, when the account moves to Performance, which starts at $1,499 a month billed annually. BigCommerce counts GMV as gross order value minus 10%.

WooCommerce#

WooCommerce core is free, "with no monthly subscription." Its pricing page puts extensions at $29 to $299 a year each and hosting at $25 to $350 a month "for most stores." The hosting figure is WooCommerce's estimate, because you buy hosting from a third party.

Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source#

Magento Open Source has no license fee: Adobe publishes its source under OSL 3.0, a "royalty-free" license. Adobe Commerce, the edition you license from Adobe, is priced separately, and our guide to what Magento costs covers both.

Payment processing#

Stripe lists 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card charge. It adds 1.5% for international cards, 1% when currency conversion is needed and 0.5% for manually entered cards, and charges $15.00 for each dispute received, plus $15.00 for each one you counter manually, refunded only if you win. Shopify Payments runs from 2.9% + 30¢ per US online card charge on Basic to 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus, and international cards add 1% on every plan. Shopify also lists premium card rates, from 3.5% + 30¢ on Basic down to 2.95% + 30¢ on Plus. Its Help Center defines premium cards as domestic commercial, corporate or business-tier cards and all domestic American Express cards, so a B2B store paid mostly by business cards pays the premium rate on most orders. BigCommerce's page says card processing through PayPal Braintree begins at 2.89% + $0.29 per transaction for US-based businesses, with American Express at 3.50%. WooPayments lists 2.90% + $0.30 per US card transaction, plus 1.50% for international payments and 1.00% for currency conversion.

Build costs: what agencies publish#

What do agencies charge to build an online store? Ecommerce website development cost is the one-time part of the bill, and a few agencies publish their own figures for it. Read each one as that agency's estimate for its own work, not as a market rate. None of these pages shows a date, so the date is the day we read them: October 16, 2026.

• ScienceSoft sets three tiers by company size: from $25,000 for a startup, with template-based design; from $55,000 for a midsized business, with custom design and functionality; and from $200,000 for a large business, with custom business logic and integrations with corporate systems.
• SmartSites says a Shopify retheme starts at $5,000 and a new Shopify store at $10,000. Stores on other platforms "are quoted after a review."
• Studio Ubique says its custom projects run from about €8,000 to €75,000, and "most land between €15,000 and €20,000." Custom or headless builds with subscription logic, multi-currency pricing, ERP connections or B2B role-based pricing cost €25,000 and up.

For surveys, Clutch's E-Commerce Website Development Pricing Guide, updated September 21, 2026, works from client reviews. It puts the average e-commerce development project at $51,943.13, and says most cost less than $10,000. It doesn't say how many reviews it counted. GoodFirms' Website Development Cost 2026 survey, updated October 14, 2026, does state its sample: 300+ web development companies across 31 countries. Its most common range for an ecommerce website, cited by 74% of those companies, is $5,000 to $50,000, and GoodFirms calls its figures an estimate.

Side by side, the published figures run from SmartSites' $5,000 retheme to ScienceSoft's $200,000 tier and beyond. Three things explain most of the gap. The figures price different jobs: a retheme, a new store and an integrated enterprise build are different purchases. They start from different rates: Clutch's average hourly cost runs from under $25 in India to $100–$149 in the United States, Canada and Australia. And averages mislead: Clutch's average is more than five times the $10,000 that most of its projects come in under. Clutch doesn't say how many projects fall in each budget band, so the data can't show whether a few very large projects or many mid-size ones lift the average that far. Our reading: the gap shows how far apart these projects are, so neither number is a price for your store.

What drives the cost#

Why do quotes for the same store differ so much? Because each agency prices the work it expects to find, and five drivers set most of the work. Agencies that publish prices name some of them: ScienceSoft's cost factors include the feature list, template-based or custom design, and cross-system integrations; Galaxy Weblinks names design complexity and the number of ERP or CRM integrations for headless builds; SmartSites ties its final price to product types and page templates, integrations, and whether products move from an older store. None of them lists data quality or your own team. This guide adds both.

The five drivers:

1. Catalog size. Products, variants, attributes and category depth set how much there is to model, import and filter.
2. Integrations. Each connected system, from the ERP to tax, shipping and marketplaces, is its own project: mapping, error handling and testing on both sides.
3. Customizations. Anything the platform doesn't do natively, such as contract pricing, a product configurator or checkout changes, is an app you pay for or code you maintain.
4. Data quality. Duplicates, missing attributes, unusable images and old URLs get cleaned before import, or they can break search, filters and rankings after it.
5. Team. Who on your side decides, writes the content and tests. Work nobody owns doesn't disappear; it becomes a paid extra or a gap at launch.

Two more drivers set the scope around those five. Design: adjusting a theme to your brand is a smaller job than designing from scratch. Storefronts, currencies and languages: each one adds content, pricing rules and testing. Shopify Plus includes 9 expansion stores, then charges $300 a month per extra store or a revenue share.

Count all seven before you ask for quotes, and the quotes start describing the same store.

Shopify website development cost#

How much does a Shopify build cost? Start with the plan: as of October 16, 2026, Shopify lists Basic at $29 a month billed yearly and Advanced at $299. A theme can be free; the paid themes on the first page of Shopify's Theme Store were listed at $150 to $430 when we read it, and Shopify bills a theme as a one-time charge, licensed to one store. Apps are priced separately, by each app's developer. For the build, SmartSites says a retheme starts at $5,000 and a new Shopify store at $10,000.

Plus pricing applies once you need more than the standard plans allow. On Basic, Grow and Advanced, Shopify B2B allows up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets, where Plus offers unlimited catalogs. Plus includes 9 expansion stores, and Shopify's redirect limit rises from 100,000 below Plus to 20,000,000 on it. Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term.

Our Shopify development page sorts what Shopify does natively from what takes an app or custom code.

B2B and integration-heavy stores#

What does a B2B ecommerce website cost? Usually more than a retail store with the same catalog, because trade buyers expect their own prices, quotes, payment terms and quick reorder, and most of that data lives in the ERP. B2B ecommerce platform cost is only partly published: Shopify's Basic, Grow and Advanced plans cap B2B at 3 active catalogs, and BigCommerce's B2B Edition page says "Contact us for pricing." The published build figures that name B2B or integration work sit high in their ranges: Studio Ubique puts builds with ERP connections or B2B role-based pricing at €25,000 and up, and ScienceSoft's from-$200,000 tier is the one that lists integrations with corporate systems.

Integrations often drive the total because each one has to stay right on every page and every order. Contract prices, stock, credit limits and order status come from the ERP. Punchout lets a buyer shop from inside their procurement system, and EDI exchanges purchase orders and invoices with a trading partner's system. Each of those connections is set up and tested per buying organization or trading partner, so that cost grows with your customer list, not your catalog. The expensive failures are the silent ones: a dropped order, or a price list half-applied overnight.

Proof: ERP syncs made several times faster, with silent data loss eliminated.

Our page on B2B ecommerce builds compares what each platform covers natively and what has to be built.

Headless and custom builds#

Does headless cost more? Yes, and the vendor says so. Shopify's developer docs state that "a headless storefront costs more to build and run than a theme," and tell developers to "make sure that the merchant accepts the added cost and complexity." You build and run two systems: the storefront, and the commerce platform behind it. A fully custom store goes one step further: everything a platform would have shipped, from search to checkout, becomes code you pay to write and then maintain.

Galaxy Weblinks publishes a headless band. As of October 16, 2026, it says small to mid-sized builds "may start around $20,000–$50,000," and that enterprise builds with custom features, microservices and multi-channel integrations "can go well beyond $100,000."

Shopify's own test for when the extra cost is worth it: consider headless when your systems, processes or customer experience "can't be achieved with Shopify's sales channels, themes, and apps." Our headless commerce page sets headless against each platform's fast native option.

Rebuilding or migrating an existing store#

What does a replatform cost next to a new build? Everything the new build costs, plus the work of moving what you already have without losing it. None of the agency pages above publishes a separate migration price, so here is what the extra work consists of:

• Data migration. Products, customers and order history, mapped field by field, imported to staging and reconciled against the old store.
• Redirect mapping. Google's site-move guidance says "it's important to map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site," with server-side permanent redirects kept "for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year." Large catalogs can hit platform caps: Shopify allows 100,000 redirects below Plus.
• Customer accounts. Passwords don't carry over: Shopify says "you can't migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV." Since Shopify deprecated legacy customer accounts on February 26, 2026, new stores sign customers in with a one-time code sent to their email, so nobody has to set a new password.
• SEO retention. Google warns of "ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site," so rankings and traffic get measured before the move and watched after it.

Proof: Tens of thousands of redirects mapped for a zero-downtime replatform.

How we run one, step by step: ecommerce migration.

Ongoing costs after launch#

What will you pay every year after launch? Seven lines recur: the platform plan, any platform fee on sales, apps or extensions, hosting on self-hosted platforms, payment fees, maintenance and marketing. Studio Ubique lists maintenance from €39 a month for monthly updates and backups to €59 a month for weekly updates. If you staff it in-house, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for web developers and digital designers at $99,520, as of May 2025; benefits and payroll taxes come on top. SEO has its own guide: what ecommerce SEO costs.

The fullest published totals we found sit on WooCommerce's pricing page: sample total-cost-of-ownership summaries from its agency partner StuntCoders. For a European luxury brand with $2M in annual revenue, they put the first year at about $139,000 and each year after at about $89,500, or 6.95% and 4.48% of revenue, payment fees included.

To estimate the cost of an ecommerce website like yours over three years, add up inputs you can look up:

Three-year cost = build + (36 × monthly fees) + (3 × yearly fees) + payment fees + platform fees on sales + your team's time

1. Build: the one-time figure from the quotes you collect.
2. Monthly fees: platform plan, apps and hosting.
3. Yearly fees: extensions and anything else billed once a year. Count each fee once; anything quoted per month, such as a plan or a maintenance contract, goes under monthly fees.
4. Payment fees: your percentage rate times three years of card sales, plus the fixed fee times your three-year order count. At $1 million a year in card sales, Shopify Payments' 2.5% standard rate on Advanced comes to $75,000 over three years before the 30¢ per order, against $10,764 for three years of Shopify Advanced at $299 a month billed yearly.
5. Platform fees on sales: Shopify's third-party transaction fee, BigCommerce's Open Payment Provider Fee or the overage on BigCommerce Scale. On Shopify Advanced, a store using a third-party processor also pays Shopify's 0.6%: $18,000 over three years at that volume. On BigCommerce, $299 a month billed annually buys Scale, which also charges 0.9% on GMV (gross order value minus 10%) above $33,333 a month: at the same $1 million a year, about $375 a month, or roughly $13,500 over three years.
6. Your team's time: hours a month on the store, times 36, times what an hour of that time costs you.

Compare platforms on that total, not on the plan fee.

How to get quotes you can compare#

What should you send agencies so quotes line up? The same five facts, in writing, to every bidder:

1. SKU and variant count, with a sample product export.
2. An integration list with every system named, plus the direction of each sync and how often it runs.
3. Your data sources and their state: where products, customers and orders live, and what you already know is wrong with them.
4. Design scope: an adjusted theme or a custom design, and the page templates you need, from home page to checkout.
5. Who on your side owns decisions, content and testing, by role.

Ask each bidder to price against the list line by line, and to write down what they assumed for anything missing. Quotes that answer the same list can be compared. Quotes that don't are estimates for different stores.

It's the same list we ask for before we scope ecommerce development work, and it makes every quote easier to compare, ours included.

Ecommerce website cost questions

Sources