How much does a eCommerce website cost?

Ecommerce platforms vs custom development

Most ecommerce projects start with a platform, not with custom development. Solutions like Shopify, Wordpress, or Magento make it possible to launch an online store quickly, with built-in features for products, payments, and order management. They provide ready-made building blocks such as checkout flows, tax handling, and integrations with payment providers. For standard use cases, this approach significantly reduces time and cost compared to building everything from scratch.

Even if your e-commerce platform requires complex features, today's platforms can solve many problems with paid plugins. If your e-commerce platform grows and you need more and more plugins, this can start to become a significant expense.

In practice, few companies decide to start an e-commerce platform from scratch. Today, it is easier to customize a theme or develop a plugin than to start from scratch. because developing an e-commerce site from scratch will obviously cost a lot of money.

What drives the cost of an ecommerce website?

The cost of an ecommerce website is primarily driven by its functional complexity. While many projects start with similar goals, the required features, integrations, and user experience quickly create large differences in budget. Below are the main factors that directly impact ecommerce website costs.

One of the first costs may be design and UX. Custom layouts, responsive behavior across devices, optimized product pages, and a smooth checkout experience require careful UX work and iterative design. The more tailored the user journey is, the higher the design and development effort becomes.

Then, the size and complexity of the product catalog play a major role in ecommerce costs. Variations, categories, filters, search behavior, and content enrichment all increase implementation complexity. Advanced catalog logic often requires custom data structures and performance optimization (for example if you wanna use Elastic Search).

Payment handling is one of the most sensitive parts of an ecommerce website. You'll need to plug your payment provider to your ecommerce. It's quite easy with platform such as Shopify or Wordpress however, you may need to install or develop additional features (invoicing automation, anti-fraud, connection to your ERP...).

Ecommerce website cost ranges (realistic budgets)

Basic ecommerce website: $1,000 - $5,000: This type of project typically relies on an existing ecommerce platform and a prebuilt theme with a small product catalog, a standard checkout flow, very few customization and few third-party integrations.

Professional ecommerce website: $5,000 - $20,000: In that project, you need to implement custom design, a well-strcutured product catalog, multiple payment methods, shipping and tax configuration and some third-party intgrations (marketing, analyctics, CRM).

Advanced or custom ecommerce website: $20,000 - $100,000: In that case, your eCommerce platform should be customized. For example, you need to import products from the ERP or your inventory system integrations (through API ot not). You need implement custom business logic. The price is complex and must vary according to specific rules. You also have a lot of traffic so you need to optimized performance at scale. The user flow (checkout..) is also custom.