How much does an ecommerce website cost in the UK? Prices by platform, with running costs

What does an ecommerce website cost in the UK? The honest answer is a set of bands, all before VAT. A shop you set up yourself on Shopify costs a few hundred pounds a year. In our experience a professionally built WooCommerce, Shopify or PrestaShop shop usually costs between about £2,000 and £15,000, and some agencies quote well above that. Magento and bespoke builds start around £10,000 to £15,000 and run to £60,000 or more. On top of the build, a small shop usually costs somewhere between £50 and £200 a month to run before card fees, and card fees take roughly 1.5 % to 3 % of everything you sell.

Our own prices sit at the lower end of those bands: £2,650 plus VAT for the fixed-price Business / E-commerce package, or £65 an hour for ecommerce development with discounts on blocks of hours. The rest of this guide explains why quotes for “an online shop” can differ by a factor of ten, what you will pay every month afterwards, and what three different shops would spend in their first year.

Ecommerce website cost in the UK by platform

Platform is the first decision because it sets the floor for both the build and the running costs. These are typical market ranges alongside our own figures, all excluding VAT. Monthly figures exclude payment fees.

A few notes on where those numbers come from.

Shopify. At the time of writing, Shopify’s UK pricing page lists its three main plans at roughly £19, £49 and £259 a month when billed annually. The build can be cheap because the platform does a lot for you. The monthly bill is where it grows, mostly through paid apps. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison adds it up over three years.

WooCommerce. The software is free, so you pay for the build, hosting and upkeep. It is what we recommend for most UK shops, and our WooCommerce guide goes through Stripe, VAT and delivery set-up in detail.

PrestaShop. Similar hosting needs to WooCommerce, but a much smaller pool of UK developers and modules, which pushes maintenance up a little.

Magento. A different class of project. Our build estimates on the hourly model run from about £10,725 for a single store to over £31,000 for two storefronts with ERP and product feeds, and hosting alone is £100 to £800 a month. The Magento guide explains when that spend pays for itself. In our view, for most shops under about £1m of online turnover it does not, as our three-way platform comparison shows.

Bespoke. Your own application with its own basket and checkout. It makes sense when you sell by quote, by calculation or inside a larger system, and rarely otherwise.

What drives the price up or down

Two WooCommerce shops can cost £2,650 and £12,000 and both be fairly priced. The difference is almost never the number of pages. It is these six things.

• Design. Adapting a good existing theme takes days. A hand-built theme designed around your products takes weeks and, in our experience, usually loads faster and sells better.
• Products and data. Fifty simple products typed in by hand is an afternoon. Three thousand products with sizes, colours, weights and images, exported from an old system with inconsistent columns, is a project of its own.
• Integrations. Each system the shop has to talk to (couriers, accounting, stock, a marketplace, a CRM) adds hours to build and something to maintain for good.
• Custom rules. Trade prices, quantity breaks, made-to-measure calculators, deposits, subscriptions, delivery rules by postcode.
• Migration. Moving customers, orders and URLs from an old shop without losing rankings.
• Who supplies the content. Product photography and descriptions are the most underestimated cost in ecommerce. Two hundred products at twenty minutes each is about 67 hours of somebody’s time, whoever that somebody is.

To put numbers on the technical items, this is roughly what we would estimate for common additions to a WooCommerce shop, at our E-commerce Development rate of £65 an hour before any volume discount.

These are planning figures, not quotes. The ERP row has the widest spread because it depends entirely on the quality of the other system’s API, and that is rarely known on day one.

What a very cheap shop leaves out

You will see online shops advertised for £500. They exist, and for a hobby business they may be fine. What you usually get is a free theme with your logo on it, a handful of products entered, and a payment plugin switched on. What tends to be missing is the unglamorous work: VAT configured and checked on real orders, delivery rules tested, order emails that reach inboxes, terms and returns pages that match the law, image compression, backups, and anyone to ring when the checkout breaks on a Saturday.

Running costs: what you pay every month

The build is paid once. These are paid for as long as the shop is open, and over three years they normally add up to more than the build.

Payment fees

Payment fees are the running cost people forget to budget and the one that grows fastest. At the time of writing Stripe’s UK pricing page lists 1.5 % + 20p for standard UK cards, and PayPal’s lists 2.9 % + 30p for standard domestic PayPal payments. Shopify Payments rates fall as you move up plans, from around 2 % down to around 1.5 %, plus a fixed fee per order. Check the live pricing pages before you budget, because all three change.

The fixed pence matter more than the percentage when your orders are small:

Most shops should still offer PayPal next to cards, because some customers will not buy without it. Our Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless comparison works through the mix. Add a small allowance for disputes as well: Stripe charges £20 for each dispute you receive at the time of writing.

Hosting and maintenance

In our experience, cheap shared hosting is the most common reason a WooCommerce shop feels slow, and a slow checkout loses orders quietly. Budget £20 to £80 a month. Maintenance means tested updates, off-site backups, security monitoring and someone checking that the checkout still works after every plugin update. On our hourly model, a shop needing about four hours a month uses a 50-hour block of WordPress Development in a year: £2,500 less 20 % is £2,000 plus VAT, with hours that never expire.

The costs that are not on any quote

• VAT. You must register once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any rolling 12 months, or if you expect to take more than £90,000 in the next 30 days alone. After that, a sixth of every standard-rated price your customers pay belongs to HMRC, which changes your margins more than any platform fee.
• Returns. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, most online purchases by consumers can be cancelled within 14 days of delivery, and the refund normally has to include the standard delivery charge. The customer pays the return postage only if you told them so before they bought; if your terms are silent, you pay. Price that in.
• Packaging and postage, including the free delivery threshold you will be tempted to offer.
• Marketing. A new shop has no visitors. Whether it is search, ads, marketplaces or email, something has to bring them, and it costs either money or time every month.

Three worked examples

All three businesses are made up for illustration. The second and third use the same assumptions as the examples in our platform comparison articles, so the figures line up. Everything excludes VAT unless stated.

A candle maker in Cardiff: 30 products, £20,000 a year

At this size, paying for a custom build rarely makes sense. Shopify Basic, set up over a couple of weekends:

• plan, billed annually: about £19 × 12 = £228;
• free theme, domain about £12;
• payment fees on 500 orders averaging £40, assuming 2 % + 25p: £400 + £125 = £525.

Year one comes to roughly £765 plus the owner’s own time. When the shop outgrows the theme, that is the moment to pay for design.

A homeware brand in Bristol: 200 products, £150,000 a year

About 3,000 orders at an average of £50. A WooCommerce shop on our fixed-price package, with extra hours for a product import and courier integration:

• Business / E-commerce package: £2,650;
• 20 hours of E-commerce Development: £1,300 less 15 % = £1,105;
• build total £3,755, which is £4,506 with VAT;
• managed hosting at £30 a month: £360;
• paid extensions: about £300;
• maintenance, 24 hours of WordPress Development at £50 less 15 %: £1,020;
• Stripe at 1.5 % + 20p: £2,250 + £600 = £2,850.

Year one comes to £8,285. Take out the build and the shop costs £4,530 a year to run, of which just over 60 % is card fees. That assumes every order is paid with a standard UK card; premium and overseas cards cost more, so treat it as a minimum. Without card fees it is £140 a month.

A parts supplier in Birmingham: 4,000 products, £600,000 a year

Trade and retail pricing, stock synced with an ERP, around 12,000 orders a year. This is the size where Magento is at least worth pricing, so here are both.

Card fees on standard Stripe pricing would be 1.5 % of £600,000 plus 12,000 × 20p, so £9,000 + £2,400 = £11,400 on either platform. At this volume you should ask Stripe and at least one other provider for negotiated rates, because a tenth of a percentage point is £600 a year.

Magento costs about £10,000 more in the first year. Whether that is worth paying depends on whether its built-in trade features remove manual work your staff currently do by hand.

What we charge

• Elite Website, £999 + VAT. Up to 15 pages with bookings, payments and custom forms. Suits a service business that takes bookings or simple payments rather than running a full catalogue.
• Business / E-commerce, £2,650 + VAT (£3,180 including VAT). A custom WordPress or PHP shop with payments, ordering, search, multi-language, CMS, SEO set-up and a domain for five years. The regular price is £5,200. Full contents are on the packages page.
• Hourly, £65 + VAT for ecommerce development. Volume discounts apply: 5 % on 10 hours, 10 % on 15, 15 % on 20, 20 % on 50 and 25 % on 100. So 20 hours is £1,105 plus £221 VAT, £1,326 in all. 50 hours is £2,600 plus £520 VAT, £3,120. 100 hours is £4,875 plus £975 VAT, £5,850. You can pay in full or with a 50 % deposit, and unused hours stay on account.

For the general picture across brochure sites, shops and web applications, see our main guide to what a website costs in the UK.

How to bring the cost down without damaging the shop

• Launch with your best sellers. Fifty well-photographed products beat five hundred with supplier images and one-line descriptions. Add the rest in batches.
• Prepare the product data yourself. If you deliver a clean spreadsheet in the format we ask for, the import is hours. If we have to untangle it, it is days.
• Keep the checkout standard. Custom checkout steps are expensive to build and expensive to keep working through platform updates. Change the checkout only when you have evidence it is costing sales.
• Use what the platform already does before commissioning custom code. Coupons, delivery zones, tax classes and stock alerts are all built in.
• Phase the integrations. Start with payments and a courier. Add the accounting sync once orders are steady, and the ERP link when re-keying orders is clearly costing more than the integration would.
• Do not save money on hosting, backups or checkout testing. Those three are where a cheap shop becomes an expensive one.

Our recommendation by size of business

• Testing an idea, under about £20,000 a year: Shopify Basic or a marketplace, set up yourself. Spend on photography.
• An established small shop, £20,000 to £250,000: WooCommerce or Shopify, professionally built. Budget £3,000 to £5,000 for the build and £100 to £200 a month to run, plus card fees.
• £250,000 to £1m: WooCommerce with proper integrations, or Shopify on a higher plan. Budget £5,000 to £15,000 and negotiate payment rates.
• Complex B2B, several storefronts or tens of thousands of products: price Magento against WooCommerce honestly, over three years, including maintenance.
• Selling by quote, calculation or subscription to a service: talk to a developer about bespoke before forcing it into a catalogue.

We are a development agency based in London, building and maintaining shops for retailers across the UK through our e-commerce development service. If you would like a figure for your own shop, the project planner asks four short questions and takes a couple of minutes. Tell us the platform you are on now, the number of products and the systems the shop needs to connect to, and we will come back with a price or a range of hours.

Photo: Angèle Kamp via Unsplash