Shopify's Basic plan costs £19 a month in the UK, €24 in Ireland and $29 in the US when you pay for a year up front, and on a new shop it is one of the smallest lines on the bill. How much it costs to build an online store turns on three other things: whether the design is a bought theme or drawn from scratch, how many products need photographs and a description of their own, and what the shop has to talk to, from the courier that prints your labels to your accounts software.
How much does it cost to build an online store?
Built by an agency, an online store on a bought theme costs £1,500 to £5,000 in the UK and €3,000 to €8,000 in Ireland. A custom design for a few hundred products costs £4,000 to £15,000, or €6,000 to €12,000. A fully custom-coded shop starts around £15,000 in the UK. Large ones pass £40,000.
I built those ranges from five agencies' price guides, two in the UK and three in Ireland, and each row of the table rests on at least two of them. For the US, Shopify's own cost guide puts custom development at $2,000 to $20,000 or more, and client reviews on one big agency directory put most e-commerce projects under $10,000.
| What you are buying | UK | Ireland | Build time |
|---|---|---|---|
| A bought theme, set up with your products, payments and delivery | £1,500–£5,000 | €3,000–€8,000 | 3–5 weeks |
| A custom design on Shopify or WooCommerce, up to a few hundred products | £4,000–£15,000 | €6,000–€12,000 | 6–12 weeks |
| A custom-coded or headless shop, or one tied into stock and accounting systems | £15,000–£100,000+ | €20,000+ | 3–6 months |
The gap between the first two rows is the design, and on a first shop it is the line I'd cut. Buy the theme. Paid themes in Shopify's theme store cost $100 to $500, paid once, and the thousands a custom design would have cost can go on photographing every product properly and writing its page. Shoppers judge a product by its photographs far more than by the layout around them, and I'd argue that with any designer.
For a business with a distinctive visual identity, compare a customised theme with an original design. Decide based on the content and shopping experience you need, rather than assuming the more expensive option will sell more.
For sites that sell nothing, what a website costs has the ranges by type.
Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom-built shop?
Shopify suits a shop that wants to trade within weeks without looking after software. WooCommerce suits a business that already runs WordPress or wants to own every file. A custom-coded shop earns its price when the sale is more than a product in a basket: subscriptions tied to accounts, made-to-measure configurators, per-customer trade prices, bookings that hold stock.
Shopify
Shopify is rented. The plan covers hosting, security updates and the checkout, and extra features come from apps, so price the ones you'll need for reviews, email and delivery rates before comparing platforms. On monthly billing, Basic, Grow and Advanced cost £25, £65 and £344 on the UK price page and €32, €92 and €384 on the Irish one, with about a quarter off for paying yearly. Euro prices vary by country: the French and Dutch pages listed Basic at €27 on 10 September.
The fee people miss is Shopify's charge on orders paid through any provider other than Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of the provider's own charge, calculated on the whole order with tax and delivery. On €5,000 of sales a month that is €100, more than three times Ireland's Basic plan. Bank transfers and cash on delivery never attract it, PayPal Express Checkout escapes it once Shopify Payments is switched on, and Shopify Payments works in the UK, the US and every EU country except Slovakia. Use it where you can.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress, and its pricing page is plain about the rest: hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most shops, extensions at $29 to $299 a year each, and no share of your sales. Its card service, WooPayments, charges 1.5% + €0.25 per domestic card payment in the eurozone, 1.5% + £0.25 in the UK and 2.9% + $0.30 in the US, and any other provider can be used without a penalty.
The price is upkeep. WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and each extension ship their own updates. One security firm counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across WordPress plugins, themes and core in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and about half of the high-impact ones were exploited within 24 hours. Someone has to apply updates every week, so a maintenance plan belongs in the budget from the first month. I'd pick WooCommerce when the shop joins a WordPress site that already draws visitors through its articles, since keeping both on one site costs less than moving years of pages.
A custom-built shop
A custom-coded shop costs the most to build and takes no platform cut. You pay the card provider directly: 1.5% + €0.25 for a standard EEA card on Stripe's Irish price list, 1.5% + 20p for a standard UK card on the UK one. In exchange, everything a shop platform includes, from discount codes to delivery-rate tables, has to be specified, built and paid for. Custom code pays off when the thing sold is access rather than a box: Riomera, which we built from scratch, sells a paid subscription tied to an account, in Bulgarian and English. Accounts, payments and an order panel built to fit are part of the web design work we do.
What does an online store cost to run each month?
A small UK shop on Shopify pays £19 to £25 for the plan, plus a few paid apps and 2% + 25p per card payment on Basic. A WooCommerce shop swaps the plan for hosting, yearly extension fees and maintenance. Card fees overtake the plan early: 40 orders worth £2,000 cost £50 at Shopify's Basic rate, twice the monthly plan.
Plan upgrades are arithmetic. Grow cuts the UK card rate from 2% to 1.7% and costs £40 a month more than Basic on monthly billing, so it pays for itself at about £13,300 of card sales a month, or £10,000 on yearly billing. In Ireland, where the same step costs €60 a month and cuts the rate by the same 0.3 points, it breaks even at €20,000.
Maintenance is the last regular line. One Irish agency starts its care plans at €50 to €150 a month, and another lists €75 to €300. A Shopify shop needs less of it than a WooCommerce one, because the platform patches its own software.
Which payment and delivery options does a new shop need?
A new shop needs card payments with Apple Pay and Google Pay, the delivery price before checkout, and checkout without an account. Asked by Baymard Institute why they had abandoned an order, US online shoppers who weren't just browsing named extra costs such as delivery (40%), being made to create an account (18%) and too few ways to pay (9%).
In the EU and the UK, part of this is law. Article 8(3) of the Consumer Rights Directive and regulation 14 of the UK's Consumer Contracts Regulations require a shop to state its payment methods and any delivery restrictions by the start of the ordering process. I'd go further and put the delivery price on every product page, because 12% of Baymard's respondents left when they couldn't see or work out the total up front.
Then there are labels. Shopify's admin sells discounted labels from the carriers it supports in your country, the discount depending on the plan. A WooCommerce or custom shop sending from the UK or one of seven EU countries, Germany, France and Spain among them, can connect to Sendcloud, which is free for up to 20 parcels a month and costs £7 a month plus 7p a label on its UK Lite plan, or €28 plus €0.10 on the euro one.
Before any ad money is spent, open the shop on a phone inside the Instagram and Facebook apps and buy something, because that is where someone who taps your ad lands. Use a real card. What those ads cost has its own article.
Which legal pages does an online shop need in the EU and UK?
An online shop selling to consumers in the EU or the UK needs terms of sale, a privacy policy, a returns page explaining the 14-day right to cancel, and the business's name, address, email, company number and VAT number where anyone can find them. EU rules applying from 19 June 2026 add a withdrawal button.
The business details are required by Article 5 of the E-Commerce Directive in the EU and regulation 6 of the Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002 in the UK. Article 13 of the GDPR, kept in the UK GDPR, lists what the privacy policy must say.
The 14 days run from the day the goods arrive, under Article 9 of the Consumer Rights Directive in the EU and regulation 30 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 in the UK. Fail to tell customers about the right before they order and the period stretches by 12 months. The refund, standard delivery included, is due within 14 days of the customer telling you, though you may hold it until the goods come back or the customer shows they've been sent, and the customer pays return postage only if you said so beforehand (Articles 10, 13 and 14; in the UK, regulations 31, 34 and 35).
Two buttons in an EU shop carry wording the law prescribes. Under Article 8(2) the order button must read “order with obligation to pay” or an unambiguous equivalent, and a customer who pressed one that fails that test isn't bound by the order; regulation 14 sets the same rule in the UK. The second came with Directive (EU) 2023/2673, which added Article 11a. For the whole withdrawal period the shop must show a function labelled “withdraw from contract here” or an unambiguous equivalent, collect the customer's name, the order and where to send the confirmation, take the submission through a button reading “confirm withdrawal”, and confirm receipt by email or another durable medium, repeating what was sent with the date and time. Test it before launch.
In the US, read the FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule: ship within the time you advertise, or within 30 days if you state none, and when you can't, get the buyer's consent to the delay or refund the order.
This is not legal advice. Have a lawyer read your terms before launch, and an accountant settle VAT before the first parcel goes abroad.
Who writes the product pages, and how do they rank in Google?
Product pages are written by the shop owner or by a copywriter paid per product, and what gives one its chance in Google is a descriptive address of its own, a description written for that product, clear photographs and product data Google can read.
Google's guidance for online shops recommends both structured data on product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center, which listings in the Shopping tab require. Google's own example of a good product address is /product/black-t-shirt-with-a-white-collar rather than /product/3243, with a separate URL for each variant, such as /t-shirt/green. Photographs should be large and consistent: Shopify recommends 2048 × 2048 pixels for square product images, and I'd shoot every product on the same background, in the same light, plus one photo of it in use.
Manufacturer descriptions are the trap. The same paragraph sits on every other shop selling that product, so it gives Google no reason to show yours. With 300 products and time for 30 descriptions, I'd write the 30 that sell best and then the category pages above them, since a category page with a short, specific introduction is what answers a broader search like “linen shirts”.
How long does it take to build an online store?
An online store on a bought theme takes three to five weeks to build, a custom design six to twelve weeks and a custom-coded shop three to six months. Four UK and Irish agencies print those times beside their prices, and one of them adds two to four weeks if product content is gathered during the build.
That delay is avoidable. Finish the spreadsheet of products, prices, weights and photographs before design starts.
Before you ask for a quote
Can I start on Shopify and move to another platform later?
Do I have to charge VAT at other EU countries' rates?
If your business is based in the EU, yes, once your sales to consumers in other EU countries pass €10,000 a year, and from then on you charge the rate of the country each parcel goes to. The One Stop Shop lets you register in one EU country to declare and pay all of it. A UK or US shop sending parcels worth up to €150 to EU consumers can declare and pay the VAT on them through the Import One Stop Shop, with an intermediary based in the EU.
Does the European Accessibility Act apply to a small shop?
It has covered e-commerce services since 28 June 2025, but Directive (EU) 2019/882 exempts microenterprises providing services: fewer than 10 staff and an annual turnover or balance sheet of no more than €2 million. I'd build to it anyway, because retrofitting a checkout after the shop outgrows the exemption costs more than building it accessibly.
Do made-to-order products have to accept returns within 14 days?
No. Article 16 of the Consumer Rights Directive excludes goods made to the customer's specifications or clearly personalised, as well as goods that spoil quickly and sealed hygiene goods unsealed after delivery, and regulation 28 does the same in the UK. Article 6(1)(k) still requires you to tell customers before they pay that the right does not apply, so say so on the product page, not only in the terms.