Three scenarios and their price
Market prices vary enormously — not because somebody is greedy, but because three different products all get called “an online store”. Here are honest reference points, the same ones built into our calculator.
What the price is made of
The cost of development is almost always the team’s time, and time goes not into “making it pretty” but into logic. Here is what genuinely moves an estimate.
- Catalogue size and structure. A hundred products with two attributes and ten thousand with sizes, colours and per-warehouse stock are different projects.
- How the price is calculated. A fixed price list is cheaper than segment discounts, promo codes, loyalty points and quantity-based pricing.
- Payment and delivery. One payment provider and click-and-collect is one thing; three providers, instalments and address-based delivery pricing is another entirely.
- Integrations. The exchange with an accounting system, a warehouse or a CRM is almost always the most expensive part, because it depends on someone else’s system rather than on us.
- Design. A ready-made theme carefully adapted to your brand, or bespoke layouts with motion — the difference reaches one and a half times.
Where cutting corners is a mistake
- Payments. A failure at this step is money lost, not an inconvenience.
- Speed. Every extra second of load on mobile measurably reduces conversion — that is no longer a debatable claim.
- The admin panel. If changing a price requires a developer, the store starts going stale a month after launch.
- Analytics. Without it you will never learn where buyers drop out, and you will be improving things blind.
Speed deserves a note of its own: it breaks in places nobody looks. We walked through it on our own site — six and a half seconds before the text appeared, because of one layer in the markup.
How long it takes
A full store takes 9–14 weeks. The first 2–3 weeks go into catalogue structure and design, then development runs in sprints with a demo every two weeks. It can be compressed by roughly a third by expanding the team, but not halved: some of the work is inherently sequential.
Frequently asked questions
Can it be done for less?
Yes, by starting with a storefront on an existing engine — from $6,000. That is a sensible start when you need to test demand: you get a catalogue, a cart and payments, while complex discount logic and integrations come later. Moving to your own platform afterwards costs more than building it in the first place, so treat this as validating a hypothesis rather than saving money long-term.
Off-the-shelf or custom?
If your business process is standard, take something off the shelf — and we will say so plainly. Custom development is justified when you have your own logic: complex discounts, multiple warehouses, your own delivery pricing, or an integration with production. Do the maths over three years, licences and customisation included.
What does support cost after launch?
Bugs in our code we fix free of charge, no matter how many years have passed. You pay for growth: new features, integrations, catalogue changes. Managed support with monitoring and a guaranteed response time starts at $1,200 a month.
Who owns the store once it is paid for?
You do — the source code, the design, the server and domain credentials. No lock-in: any other developer can pick the work up, because we hand over the documentation too.
These articles are written by engineers working on the projects — but they are not signed by name. The reason is the same one that keeps client logos off this site: nearly every project runs under an NDA or white-label, and a byline on a piece about a payment core points at the client as clearly as a logo would. Instead of names, we stand behind the text with rules — except for articles about our own open-source code, which carry the author’s name.
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