How much does an e-commerce website cost? The real budget to plan for

Your competitor has just launched an online store. Your supplier asks if you have an e-commerce site. Your sales director has been talking about e-commerce for six months. The question is no longer "should we get started?", but "how much does it really cost?" And that's where it gets complicated. Between the freelancer who offers you €1,500 and the agency that starts at €15,000, between Shopify at $39/month and the custom solution at €80,000, how do you find your way? Not by looking for a universal answer that doesn't exist. But by understanding what makes the price of an e-commerce site vary, and what every euro invested truly buys.

Criteria that make up the price of an e-commerce site

The price of an e-commerce site is like the price of a house. It depends. To give you an honest range, it goes from €0 to several million euros. This answer is not an evasion: it's the reality of a market where a free Shopify theme and a custom site for an international group are simply not comparable.

For a house, the criteria are tangible: surface area, location, materials. For an e-commerce site, the underlying technology is less visible, but just as decisive. Six main variables define your budget: who builds the site, on which platform, based on what graphic design, with what features, what content, and in what technical ecosystem. Let's break down each of these levers.

Who develops the site?

You or your team

If you have technical skills - or a collaborator who does - you can design your store yourself. The real cost is then only time. Most modern platforms offer visual editors accessible without coding. Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS remains a plus to adjust specific elements without calling on a service provider.

This option is well suited for launching a first store with a limited catalog, to validate a concept before investing further. It reaches its limits as soon as you need extensive customization, third-party integrations, or a carefully designed user experience to convert.

A freelancer

You don't have the skills, the desire, or the time to do your site yourself? A freelancer is a relevant intermediate option. Daily rates generally range between €300 and €800 per day depending on the profile and specialization. For a well-defined project, with clear specifications, most will offer a fixed price.

For a less complex site, with little customization, prices start around €2,000. This amount can quickly double or triple if the project evolves along the way, which often happens when the initial brief is not sufficiently structured. This is also one of the main pitfalls of using a freelancer without a solid statement of work: amendments accumulate and the final budget far exceeds the initial estimate.

An e-commerce agency

For projects requiring strategic thinking, advanced personalization, or specific business issues, an agency is the right option. It brings together several areas of expertise: artistic direction, user experience, front-end integration, back-end development, conversion strategy. These skills rarely coexist in a single freelancer.

A simple project with a Shopify agency generally starts at €10,000. More complex projects, for medium-sized businesses or groups, can reach several hundred thousand euros. Price is not a marker of seriousness in itself: it reflects the seniority of the profiles involved and the real complexity of the project.

To precisely compare freelance and agency models, and understand what each option truly includes, consult our detailed analysis on the price of a Shopify agency.

According to a Baymard Institute study (2024), the average cart abandonment rate in global e-commerce reaches 70.19%. A poorly designed site - confusing navigation, overly long purchase funnel, lack of reassurance - costs much more than the savings made by outsourcing at a lower cost.

On which platform?

The choice of technical solution conditions both the launch cost and the total cost of ownership over the site's lifetime. Two main models are opposed.

Open source solutions - WooCommerce, PrestaShop

The software is free. However, you pay for hosting, maintenance, security updates, and server infrastructure management. At WPEngine, a specialist in WordPress / WooCommerce hosting, public plans range from $25 to $250 per month. Maintenance costs vary from zero (total lack of monitoring) to several hundred euros per month with a dedicated contract.

Open source offers maximum flexibility and no sales commissions. In return, the technical burden is heavier: each major update can generate incompatibilities, and security relies entirely on your teams or your service provider.

SaaS solutions - Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce

You rent the platform: hosting, security, maintenance, and updates are included in the subscription. Shopify offers plans from $39 to $399/month (2025 rates), with a commission on sales of 2% to 0.5% depending on the chosen plan. Shopify Plus, for large volumes, starts at around $2,000/month.

The advantage of SaaS is its stability and native scalability. During Black Friday 2023, Shopify processed up to 4.2 million transactions per hour without service interruption - a level of resilience impossible to achieve with classic shared hosting. To understand the differences between offers and choose the right plan, our complete Shopify guide gives you all the keys.

Based on what graphic theme?

The user interface is defined by a theme: a presentation template that includes formatting (typography, colors, spacing) and native features (mega menu, carousel, dynamic cart, predictive search). It is the visual and functional foundation of your store.

Three levels exist, with very different budgetary implications.

• Free theme: variable quality, basic features, limited customization. Sufficient to start, but rarely up to the standards of a brand that wants to differentiate itself.
• Premium theme: from a few tens to several hundreds of dollars depending on the functional richness and code quality. Customization remains possible without rebuilding everything.
• Custom theme: developed specifically for your brand, based on mock-ups and prototypes. Prices are significantly higher, but the user experience can be entirely designed for your catalog and audience.

The choice of theme has a direct impact on the conversion rate. A Google study (2023) showed that a 3-second loading time instead of 1 second causes the conversion rate to drop by 32%. Recent premium themes, optimized for Core Web Vitals, offer a concrete advantage on this point.

What features?

Every feature adds value - and cost. Marketing, logistics, customer service, product personalization, integration with third-party tools: the list can be long. Two implementation strategies coexist.

Specific development

The feature is custom developed according to your specifications. The cost depends on the number of development days, which itself depends on the technical complexity. This approach offers total freedom, but represents the highest cost and longest delays.

Applications and modules

The feature has already been developed and is available on a marketplace. It can be free, sold as a one-time purchase (a few hundred to a few thousand euros) or rented as a monthly subscription (generally $9 to $99/month). The Shopify ecosystem has more than 13,000 applications available in its App Store - a massive argument for this platform.

The cost of a module is generally indexed to the value it generates. A product recommendation application powered by AI like Rebuy costs between $99 and $349/month - but it can increase the average cart value by 15% to 25%, making it quickly profitable on a high-volume catalog.

Warning: accumulating many applications without a clear strategy weighs down the store, fragments the user experience, and generates monthly costs that quietly accumulate. A rigorous selection is better than an exhaustive collection.

What content?

This is the most often underestimated budget item, sometimes completely overlooked. Quality content is not an accessory: it is a lever for trust, conversion, and natural referencing.

Who will produce the texts, photos, and videos for your store? Will you reuse existing content or invest in exclusive and differentiating content? The options are numerous, but the budgetary implications vary considerably.

• Professional product photography can range from €50 to several hundred euros per reference, depending on the level of care taken.
• Copywriting for product sheets, category pages, and the homepage is an investment often neglected, although it directly influences the conversion rate.
• Video content, increasingly expected on product pages, can represent several thousand euros of production for a few well-controlled formats.

Major e-commerce brands have known this for a long time: they allocate dedicated internal resources to content production, reusable across all their channels. It is a structuring investment, not an incidental expense.

In what technical environment?

Projects costing tens or hundreds of thousands of euros are rarely isolated sites. They are part of a larger digital and operational ecosystem, the integration cost of which is often higher than the cost of the site itself.

Common connections in a medium-sized e-commerce project include: an ERP (stock and order management), a CRM or an email marketing platform like Klaviyo, a logistics management solution, a PIM (product catalog management), and connectors for physical points of sale.

Each connection requires a specific connector, the development of which varies from a few days for a standard integration to several weeks for a proprietary system. Pre-existing connectors exist for the most common tools - Klaviyo, Gorgias, Recharge, Yotpo - but they remain paid and require careful configuration.

Hidden costs that no one mentions

Beyond the initial quote, several expense items are systematically underestimated by brands launching their first e-commerce site.

The platform subscription is billed monthly, whether there are sales or not. At $39/month for Shopify Basic, it's marginal. At $399/month for Shopify Advanced, the trade-off deserves consideration depending on your volume.

Third-party applications accumulate quickly. On average, an active Shopify store uses 6 to 10 applications. If half are paid at an average of $29/month, the monthly bill exceeds $100 without anyone having truly decided it.

Maintenance and evolutions are rarely included in a creation quote. An e-commerce site is constantly evolving: new features, security updates, fixes, performance optimizations. Budgeting for a monthly fee or a maintenance package avoids unpleasant surprises.

SEO and acquisition are often the poor relations of initial budgets. A beautiful site without traffic sells nothing. To understand how to make your store a client-generating machine, our guide on e-commerce conversion is a useful starting point.

An analysis published by WeLoveDev in 2025 estimates the total annual cost of a professional e-commerce site between €25,000 and €1,300,000 depending on the target revenue. Initial development often represents only 20% to 30% of this global envelope. This reality is rarely clearly presented by service providers - and even less anticipated by entrepreneurs launching their store.

The real question: ROI versus cost

Asking "how much does it cost?" is the right way to start. But the question that conditions your decision is different: how much does it generate?

An e-commerce site is not an expense. It is a business asset that must generate a measurable return: revenue, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost. The arbitration logic then changes completely. A free store versus a store designed by an agency is not compared on the initial price: it is compared on the sales generated in the first twelve months.

Some data to calibrate this reflection: according to Shopify, stores that invest in a premium theme and professional UX optimization see an average increase of 20% to 40% in their conversion rate compared to stores built on a free theme without customization. With 10,000 monthly visits and an average cart of €60, going from 1% to 1.5% conversion rate represents an additional €3,000 in revenue each month.

It is this angle - the ROI angle - that structures the budgetary thinking of the most successful brands. They do not ask "what is the minimum budget to launch a site?", but "what is the optimal investment to achieve my sales objectives in twelve months?"

If you want to understand how a Shopify store can become a real growth lever - and not just an online presence - our page on Shopify store creation and optimization details our approach.

Conclusion

There is no single price for an e-commerce site. There is your price: the one that corresponds to your catalog, your market, your ambition, and your stage of development. The good news is that the variables that define this price are all controllable if you understand them before briefing your service providers.

Remember the essential: the initial development cost is only part of the equation. The technical environment, content, maintenance, and acquisition are equally structuring elements. And on each of these items, under-investment costs more in the long run than the right investment from the start.

Do you have an e-commerce project and want to build a realistic budget? Consult our guide to creating your online store, or book a direct discussion with our team for a no-obligation audit. At Stellar Projects, we have been supporting ambitious brands since 2018 - and we know that the best stores are not built on the lowest budget, but on the most informed decision.