An online store can cost anything from a weekend of your own time to a project that runs for months. The range is that wide because the phrase covers everything from twelve products on a template to a storefront with wholesale pricing, subscriptions and stock synced to a till. What follows is what actually moves the number.
What you are paying for
Roughly, a store build is four things: the design, the storefront itself, the product data, and everything that has to talk to something else. Most quotes differ because they include different amounts of the last two.
The platform decision moves it most
A hosted platform gets you selling quickly and charges you monthly, plus a slice of each sale on some plans. A custom storefront costs more up front and less per order, and it lets the shop work exactly the way your business does rather than the way the platform assumes.
Neither is the right answer in general. A shop with a simple range and standard checkout rarely needs a custom build. A business with unusual ordering, made-to-order items, or a catalogue that changes daily often finds the template fighting it within a year.
The costs that surprise people
- Product photography, which is usually the single biggest line outside the build
- Writing product descriptions, which nobody enjoys and everybody underestimates
- Migrating existing orders, customers and URLs from an old shop without losing search rankings
- Integrations: accounting, stock, shipping labels, an EPOS till, a subscription tool
- Anything involving variants, because complexity grows faster than the product count suggests
What it costs to run
The build is the smaller number over five years. Hosting, the platform subscription, payment fees, apps, and someone keeping it current all continue. Payment processing alone is a real percentage of revenue, and it is worth knowing yours before you compare platforms.
The other running cost is attention. A store that nobody updates stops earning. Whoever owns it needs an hour a week for stock, content and the small fixes that accumulate, or somebody doing it for them.
How to get a number you can trust
Ask for a quote against a written scope: how many products, which payment methods, which integrations, who writes the content, who takes the photographs, and what happens after launch. A quote without those is a guess, and it will be revised once the work starts.
It is also worth asking what happens when you want to change something in a year, because that answer tells you more about the real cost than the build price does.
The short version. Platform choice, product data and integrations decide the cost, in that order. Scope those three honestly and the quotes you get back will be comparable.
