Ecommerce website cost UK: what an online shop costs

An ecommerce website in the UK typically costs between about £3,000 and £15,000 to build, plus transaction fees on every sale and roughly £20 to £100 a month to run. A small shop on a hosted platform can start far lower, at a few hundred pounds plus a monthly fee.

The spread is wider than for a normal website because “a shop” hides an enormous amount of variation. Twelve products with one postage rate and four hundred products with trade pricing are not the same job. This sets out what moves the number.

What an ecommerce website costs

The ongoing column is the one people forget. On a hosted platform you pay a monthly fee plus a cut of each sale. On WooCommerce the software is free and you pay hosting plus payment processing. Neither is automatically cheaper, and which wins depends almost entirely on your turnover. We work through the numbers at two sales volumes in Shopify vs WooCommerce.

The costs that are easy to miss

• Payment processing. Commonly around 1.5% to 3% plus a small fixed fee per transaction. On real turnover this dwarfs the build cost. Worth modelling before choosing a platform.
• Product photography. Usually the largest content cost in a shop, and the one that most affects whether anything sells.
• Writing product descriptions. Forty products means forty pieces of writing. This is where shop projects stall.
• Postage rules. Sounds trivial. Weight bands, zones, free thresholds and collection options take real setup time.
• Getting stock in. If your products live in a spreadsheet or another system, importing them is a job of its own.

What actually drives the price up

Not page count. These are the things that genuinely change the number.

• How many products, and how many variants each. One shirt in five sizes and four colours is twenty combinations to manage.
• Unusual pricing. Trade accounts, quantity breaks, price on application, part exchange.
• Postage complexity. One flat rate is easy. Weight based, zoned and item specific rules are not.
• Integrations. Accounting, stock control, couriers, a till in a physical shop.
• Whether customers have accounts. Logins mean personal data, and personal data means building it properly first time.

That last point is worth pausing on. Anything storing customer accounts or card details should be built correctly at the start, even if it delays the pretty part, because changing how it handles data after real people have signed up means moving live customer records rather than editing a page.

Do you need a checkout at all?

This is the question we ask most often and the one people least expect from a web designer.

If you sell a small number of high value items, a full checkout can be the wrong answer. Someone spending several thousand pounds usually wants a conversation first, and an enquiry form often converts better than a buy button while costing far less to build.

We do say this to people who are ready to pay us for the bigger build. A vintage watch dealer came to us in September wanting a full shop. After looking at his stock and his margins, we told him to start with a catalogue on his own site and point purchases at the marketplace he already sells through, and to add a checkout later if the catalogue proved it was worth it. That was the cheaper answer and it was the right one. It is covered in more detail in landing page optimisation.

Conversely, if you sell many low value items, a checkout is not optional and the automation around it is where the value sits.

Hosted platform or WooCommerce

We build on WooCommerce, so weigh that accordingly. The reason is that shops tend to grow into awkward requirements, and on a hosted platform the answer at that point is often a higher tier or simply no. We built CW Watches a shop with a private stock room so he can list a watch from his phone with photos, a price and a stock number and have it live in under a minute, then enter a tracking number on sale and have the customer emailed automatically. That is the kind of thing you reach WooCommerce for.

If your shop is genuinely simple and you want it handled, a hosted platform is a perfectly sensible purchase. The comparison between the underlying platforms is in Squarespace vs WordPress.

How to get an accurate quote

1. Say how many products you have, and how many variants each.
2. Describe your postage rules in plain sentences.
3. Say whether customers need accounts.
4. List anything it must connect to: accounting, stock, couriers, a till.
5. Say who is writing the product descriptions and taking the photos.
6. Ask for one fixed price, with what is not included written down.

How we put this together

The bands are our own, from quoting shop builds and from prices clients have shown us from elsewhere. Transaction fee ranges are typical UK rates and are approximate, so check the current figures with whichever provider you use rather than taking ours as exact.

The section on what drives price up comes from building shops with genuinely awkward requirements, and the advice about skipping the checkout comes from telling people not to buy one.

The short version

Budget roughly £3,000 to £15,000 for a UK ecommerce build, or less for a simple hosted shop, plus transaction fees and about £20 to £100 a month running costs. Price is driven by products, variants, postage rules and integrations, not by page count. Model the transaction fees before choosing a platform, and ask honestly whether you need a checkout at all.

For the wider picture, see how much a website costs in the UK and website development cost. If you want a real number for your own shop, tell us what you sell and we will come back the same working day.