How much does an e-commerce site cost?
What a custom online store costs, and when a platform is the better answer.
What are you building?
What does it need to do?
How much design?
$35,000 – $115,000
- Effort
- 115–238 days
- Elapsed time
- 2–7 months
- Day rate assumed
- $320–$480
An indicative range, not a quote. Real scope moves these numbers, usually once we understand the parts you have not described yet.
Where the effort goes
- Build84–174 d
- Discovery & scoping10–21 d
- QA & testing13–26 d
- Project management8–17 d
Get a real number
Send this over and we'll come back with a scoped estimate — including the questions that would change it. Two business days, no sales script.
Most businesses should use Shopify, and we will say so before quoting anything. Building becomes the right call when your catalogue, pricing or fulfilment does not fit a platform's assumptions — B2B pricing tiers, configurable products, unusual tax or shipping logic, or an ERP that has to stay the source of truth.
What a project like this usually includes
- Catalogue and merchandising
- Products, variants, collections, search and filtering that match how your customers actually shop.
- Checkout and payments
- Payment provider integration, tax and shipping rules, and a checkout built to be finished rather than abandoned.
- Order management
- Back-office tooling for fulfilment, refunds and returns — usually where the real operational value sits.
- Systems integration
- ERP, inventory, accounting or 3PL, so stock and orders stay true in both directions.
- Analytics and tracking
- Conversion measurement set up properly, including consent handling.
What actually moves the number
- Catalogue complexity
- Configurable products, bundles, per-customer pricing and B2B tiers each add substantial logic. A flat catalogue of simple products is a different project entirely.
- Integrations
- Each external system is its own project: authentication, data mapping, error handling and reconciliation when the two disagree.
- Tax and shipping rules
- Multi-region tax and carrier-specific shipping are deceptively expensive, and they are compliance-sensitive.
- Migration
- Moving products, customers and order history cleanly — and keeping existing product URLs alive.
Should we build or use Shopify?
Use Shopify unless something specific rules it out. It handles payments, PCI compliance, hosting and a large ecosystem for a predictable monthly fee, and that is very hard to beat. Building is justified when platform fees at your volume exceed the build, when your pricing or fulfilment logic cannot be expressed within it, or when the store must be a component of a larger system rather than the system itself.
Can we start on a platform and move later?
Yes, and it is often the sensible sequence: validate demand on Shopify, move when its constraints are costing you more than a build would. Keep your product data clean and exportable from the outset and that migration stays reasonable.
What about PCI compliance?
Using a hosted payment provider means card details never touch your servers, which keeps your compliance burden small. Handling card data directly changes the scope and the liability substantially, and is almost never the right choice.
What drives conversion most?
Speed, checkout friction and trust, roughly in that order. A fast store with a short checkout consistently outperforms a beautiful one that takes four seconds to load — which is why performance is treated as scope here rather than a nice-to-have.
A brief makes quotes comparable. Build one in a few minutes and send it wherever you like — including nowhere near us.