How Much Does an E-commerce Website Cost?

Search for what an online store costs and the first page will tell you $29 a month and $250,000, with a straight face, in the same ten results. Both are true. They are answers to different questions, and nobody labels which one they are answering. One set of pages is quoting you rent on a storefront somebody else owns. The other is quoting you the price of having one built. And when we read the nine results on that page, not one of them mentioned the number that ends up mattering most on a hosted store: the cut taken out of every single order, forever. That fee is the difference between the two models over any real trading period, and it is the one you cannot see from a pricing page. So here is the rent, the purchase, the fee on every order, and the arithmetic that tells you which side of it you belong on.

Why Do the Answers Range From $29 to $250,000?

Because two entirely different industries are answering, and both are being honest within their own frame.

The platform vendors sell you access. You pay monthly, they run the servers, handle updates, provide the checkout, and take a cut of your sales. Nothing is yours except your products and your customer list, and even the customer list lives in their database until you export it. That is a rental, and rentals are priced per month.

The agencies and developers sell you a thing. Design, code, a checkout wired to a payment processor, and the finished store handed over. You pay once, plus hosting, plus whatever changes you want later. That is a purchase, and purchases are priced per project.

Notice that the sponsored ad and the top agency figure are separated by a factor of roughly 800, and both appear on the same screen. That is not a market with a price. It is several markets sharing a phrase.

What Does It Cost to Have a Store Built?

For a genuinely custom store, the practitioner floor in that public thread was "$2,000 is on the low end of what I would expect," and the agencies quoting $10,000 and up are describing something with more in it: real design work, product data structured properly, a payment integration tested against edge cases, shipping and tax rules, and a checkout that has been looked at by somebody who has watched people fail to complete one.

That last part is where the money quietly goes, and it is worth more than it sounds. Baymard Institute's checkout usability research is the standard reference on how many customers get to the payment step and leave anyway, and the causes are mundane and fixable: forced account creation, surprise shipping costs, too many form fields, no visible progress. A store that converts is not a store that looks better. It is a store where fewer people give up at step four.

What drives a build quote up, roughly in order, is product count and how messy the product data is, whether you need variants and options, how many payment and shipping methods, tax across jurisdictions, whether it must talk to your accounting or inventory system, and how much of the content and photography exists already. What drives it down is a small catalogue, one payment method, one country, and a client who has their product photos and descriptions ready.

The $299 offer is not a scam, incidentally. It is a template with your logo dropped in, produced fast, and for some businesses that is genuinely enough to start taking orders. What you are not buying at that price is anything specific to how your business works.

What Does a Hosted Store Cost Every Month?

Read on 2026-08-18 from the vendors' own pricing pages, the entry tier for the two biggest hosted platforms is the same figure, and the ladder above it is nearly identical.

Shopify's published pricing lists Basic at $39 a month paid monthly or $29 paid yearly, Grow at $105 or $79, Advanced at $399 or $299, and Plus starting at $2,300. BigCommerce lists Core at $39, Growth at $105, Scale at $399, and Performance starting at $1,499 billed annually.

But BigCommerce publishes something on that page that almost nobody quoting monthly prices mentions: the plans carry sales ceilings. Core is limited to $30,000 of trailing twelve-month sales, Growth to $100,000, and Scale is stated at $33,333 a month with a 0.9% overage above the cap. So the plan you choose is not only a feature decision. It is a bet on how much you will sell, and passing your own success moves you up a tier. A store doing $10,000 a month, which is a modest and very achievable number, is already past Core and past Growth on an annual basis.

That mechanic is the honest shape of a rental. The rent goes up as the business grows, and it does so automatically.

What About the Fee Nobody on Page One Mentioned?

The percentage taken out of every order. All nine results we read for this search left it out, and over any real trading period it is larger than the subscription.

There are two layers, and mixing them up is the most common expensive mistake.

The first layer is payment processing, and everybody pays it, including a store you own outright. Stripe's published pricing is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful domestic card transaction, with no setup or monthly fee. Shopify's own payments product on the Basic plan is 2.9% plus 30 cents, falling to 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced. Those are in the same neighbourhood because they are the same job: moving money from a card to your bank.

The second layer is the one that only exists on a rental. If you use a payment processor other than the platform's own, the platform charges you an additional fee on top. On Shopify that third-party transaction fee is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. On BigCommerce the equivalent is 2.0% of eligible order value on Core, 1.0% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, and zero on a Performance contract, with no fee if you use one of their embedded providers.

Read that structure carefully, because it is doing something specific. It is not a charge for a service. It is a charge for not using theirs.

So What Does That Actually Add Up To?

Here is the arithmetic, with the assumptions on the table so you can change them. Say your average order is $50, you sell on Shopify's Basic plan at $39 a month, and you use Shopify Payments at 2.9% plus 30 cents.

At $10,000 a month, that is 200 orders. Processing is $290 plus $60 in per-order charges, so $350, plus the $39 plan. About $389 a month, or roughly $4,670 a year.

At $50,000 a month, that is 1,000 orders. Processing is $1,450 plus $300, so $1,750, plus the plan. About $1,789 a month, or roughly $21,470 a year. And at that volume you are well past the entry tier's sales ceiling on a platform that publishes one.

Those are illustrations, not quotes, and your average order value moves them more than anything else does. The point is the shape rather than the total: the subscription is the small part, and the part that grows is a percentage of your revenue. A store you own has the same processing fee and does not have the other two layers, which is why the comparison flips somewhere, and why it flips at a revenue figure rather than at a date.

When Is Renting the Right Answer, and When Does Owning Start Paying?

Rent, without hesitating, if you do not yet know whether people will buy. A hosted store at $39 a month plus processing is the cheapest way to find out whether your product sells, and spending $15,000 to find out the same thing is not brave, it is expensive. Rent if your catalogue is small and standard, if you have no unusual shipping or pricing rules, and if nobody in the business wants to think about the website. Rent if you sell seasonally and want to be able to stop. Those are real businesses and a hosted platform serves them well, which is exactly why the platforms are enormous.

Owning starts paying when three things line up. Your revenue is high enough that a percentage of it is a meaningful number. Your business does something the platform makes awkward, which usually shows up as a stack of paid apps compensating for it. And you have hit the point where the platform's rules, rather than your ideas, decide what your store can do. That third one is the one owners feel first and describe last.

There is a fourth thing, and it is not financial. On a rented store, your product data, your customer list, your order history and your page content live inside somebody else's system, exportable within the limits of what they choose to export. Moving is a replatforming project, which is a real piece of work even by the platforms' own account. On a store built for you, the code, the content and the accounts are yours, so leaving is a change of address rather than a rebuild. That is the same reasoning behind the wider custom versus platform question, and it is worth understanding before you have three years of orders inside a system you cannot leave cheaply.

If your answers were mostly in the first column, stay on the rental and spend the money on stock or on getting found. The lower two columns are where owning starts to be the cheaper choice, and the middle column usually means it is a conversation for next year rather than this month.

Frequently Asked Questions About E-commerce Website Costs

What is the cheapest e-commerce website?

A free or entry tier on a hosted platform, which realistically means about $39 a month once you want your own domain and a checkout, plus card processing on every sale. Below that there are template offers around $299 as a one-time price, which get you a working store fast with nothing specific to your business in it. The genuinely cheapest way to test an idea is a hosted store on a monthly plan, because you can stop paying.

How much does it cost to set up an e-commerce website?

Setting up a hosted store is a weekend and a monthly subscription. Having one built runs from about $2,000 at the practitioner floor for something custom, into five figures for a store with real design, structured product data, tax and shipping rules, and integrations. The setup is rarely what costs money, though. What costs money is product photography, product descriptions, and the checkout work that decides whether visitors finish.

Do I have to use the platform's payment processor?

No, but on the hosted platforms you pay extra for the choice. Shopify's published rates add a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced when you use a different processor, and BigCommerce publishes an equivalent structure. On a store you own, you pick a processor and pay only its rate.

Is Shopify cheaper than a custom store?

At low revenue, yes, clearly. At higher revenue it depends on how much of your sales the percentages take and how many apps you are paying for. Work out your annual platform cost including processing and apps, then compare it with a build cost spread over three years plus hosting. The answer is arithmetic, and it changes as you grow, which is why the honest answer is a number rather than a preference.

What ongoing costs do people forget?

Apps, which quietly become the largest line on a hosted store. Then transaction fees, which nobody counts because they never arrive as an invoice. Then product photography and descriptions for every new line, and someone's time answering customer emails. On a built store the app subscriptions mostly disappear into the code, and the ongoing cost shifts toward maintenance and hosting.

Will AI replace e-commerce?

Not in the sense the question implies, though it is changing how people find stores. Buyers increasingly ask an answer engine what to buy and where, which means your product pages need to be readable and factual for something that is not a human browsing a category. That is a reason to care about how your store is built and how well it describes what you sell, and it is the substance behind answer engine visibility. The transaction still happens on your store.

Final Thoughts

The reason this question has no single answer is that two industries are answering it. A hosted platform quotes you rent, currently $39 a month at the entry tier on both of the big two, with a sales ceiling attached and a percentage on every order that no page-one result bothered to mention. A developer quotes you a purchase, from around $2,000 at the practitioner floor into five figures for something genuinely built around your business. Both are legitimate. The comparison only becomes possible when you add the fees to the rent and put the total next to a build cost spread over a few years, and when you do that, the crossover turns out to be set by your revenue rather than by anyone's opinion.

Working it out once is worth the hour. You will know whether your current platform bill is reasonable, which apps are covering for a limitation rather than adding something, and roughly what revenue would make owning the store the cheaper option. That is a decision you can then make on purpose, at a moment you choose, instead of discovering it during a migration.

If you are somewhere near that crossover and want a straight read, tell us your monthly sales, your average order value and what you are paying in plans and apps, and we will do the arithmetic with you and tell you honestly if you should stay where you are. At Web Leveling we build custom stores on a hand-written checkout wired to Stripe, which means no platform rent and no fee for choosing your own processor. Tell us what is happening and we will reply in plain English within one business day. The code, the content, the domain and the payment account end up in your name, so the store is one you own rather than one you rent.

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