What does an online store cost in 2026?

Ask ten agencies what an online store costs and you’ll get ten answers that differ by tens of thousands of euros. That doesn’t mean anyone is lying. One agency sets up a standard Shopify theme and calls it a store; another builds an ordering platform around your inventory and accounting systems. That’s the difference between a bicycle and a delivery van, with matching price tags.

This article applies the approach from my guide to what a website costs to online stores: which options exist, what drives the price of each, and which line items show up later. As in that guide, Straffe Sites doesn’t publish its own rates, because every store has its own scope. If you want a specific estimate, a proposal based on your requirements beats any average.

The short answer: what sets the price of each option?

Rather than inventing a price list, look at what drives the work for each approach. This table compares five ways to build an online store by their cost drivers, without assigning fixed prices. Compare quotes for the same work and check whether platform fees, transaction costs, and VAT are mentioned.

Two things I keep seeing in practice. First: moving from the second option to the third mostly buys you more attention to detail. Anyone can install a theme; building a store where visitors understand what they’re buying is a different job. Second: the most expensive stores that cross my desk are the ones that had to be built twice. A wrong platform choice gets paid for twice: once for the first store and once for the rebuild.

What drives the price of your online store?

Four factors do the heaviest lifting, in order of impact.

Catalog and structure. A hundred products in three categories is a different project from five thousand products with variants, filters, and stock levels for each location. Every extra layer in your checkout requires design, development, and testing on every device your customers use.

Integrations. Accounting, shipping, inventory, an ERP system, a marketplace: as long as a ready-made connector exists, a hosted platform works well. When it doesn’t, the work shifts from configuring to building, and that shows in the price.

Design and brand. Going with a standard theme is the cheapest route and often fine. If you want the store to feel like your shop, with its own category pages and an ordering flow that matches how your customers choose, that’s design and engineering work.

Content and data. Someone has to write product copy, deliver photos, and think through categories. If you do that yourself, it takes a solid chunk off the build price. If the builder supplies it, it’s a full line item on the quote.

What does an hour of e-commerce development cost?

Most online store quotes are based on an hourly rate multiplied by the estimated hours. Four official and quasi-official figures show where that rate comes from — and why the project price always ends up above “wage × hours”:

The difference makes sense: a freelancer’s hourly rate is well above an employee’s hourly wage because social contributions, non-billable hours, tools, insurance and risk are their own responsibility. An agency adds coordination, project management and accountability on top. That is why an hourly rate means little without scope: forty focused hours achieve more than eighty unfocused ones.

Does AI make online stores cheaper?

AI can speed up parts of a build, but these price indices do not isolate its effect on online store costs. The Dutch service price index from CBS, with web design included in its methodology, rose 3.0% for computer programming and consulting in 2025 and recorded a 1.8% year-over-year change in the second quarter of 2026. In Belgium, the StatBel index for the same category was virtually flat in the first quarter of 2026: a 0.0% year-over-year change, after years of increases. Those are changes across a broad service category, not measurements of comparable stores built with and without AI.

AI can reduce time spent on product-data cleanup and repetitive page building. Whether that lowers a project’s price depends on the remaining work, the scope, and the agreement with the developer. The indices do not show how much time moved from production to strategy, review, or maintenance.

For global context, take dollar figures with a grain of salt. The GoodFirms Website Construction Cost Survey — a survey of 300+ web development companies across 31 countries, fieldwork in spring 2026 — also priced out storefront platforms separately:

In the same survey, 74% of agencies place e-commerce projects between $5,000 and $50,000, and 86% deliver such a store in 8 to 28 weeks. Those amounts are in dollars, VAT treatment varies by provider, and regions differ widely: use them as a global reference point, not as a European price list.

The cost structure behind the price

An online store isn’t a one-time purchase; it’s an ongoing operation. These are the costs that continue after launch.

• Platform or license. A SaaS subscription like Shopify is a recurring cost; WooCommerce’s software is free but runs on hosting you arrange.
• Transaction fees. Your payment provider charges a rate per payment: a fixed amount, a percentage, or a combination, depending on the payment method and your contract. At a thousand orders a month, that’s a recurring expense, not a minor detail.
• Apps and plugins. Stores use apps for reviews, email, shipping labels, and upsells. One app may cost little; twenty apps become a growing collection of subscriptions.
• Hosting and domain. With WooCommerce and custom builds, you arrange web hosting yourself; with SaaS, hosting is included in the subscription. The real difference is who’s responsible when things break.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security, and small improvements. Read more about what that involves in the guide to website maintenance.

So always calculate the total cost of an online store over two or three years. A modest build price with monthly subscriptions, apps, and transaction fees running on top costs more over three years than it sounds.

What you supply yourself (and why it cuts the price)

The build is half the work; the other half is your responsibility. Clean product data, photos that don’t each need editing, categories that make sense: those are hours the builder doesn’t spend and therefore doesn’t invoice.

In our projects, we use AI agents to help with that preparation: normalizing product data, suggesting categories, and drafting copy in your own voice. The agents do the repetitive work; people select and review the results. That keeps development time under control without the store ending up generic.

Hidden costs: where projects go over budget

Three costs tend to receive little attention in the initial quote but show up later.

Migrating your current store. Moving existing products, customers, and orders is work, especially when the old export is messy. Ask up front what gets migrated and what’s manual.

The year-two apps. Platforms start cheap and grow with your usage. What begins as three handy apps becomes a collection of subscriptions you can’t do without after two years. Write down what each app costs and what value it adds.

Rebuilding after the wrong choice. The biggest hidden cost there is. A store on the wrong platform doesn’t just move; you mostly rebuild it. That’s why “what does an online store cost?” is always followed by “what does a store that fits your business cost?”

Doing it yourself, outsourcing, or combining the two

Here is how the options compare. Building it yourself works with a platform and patience; you pay in time, and the store looks like the theme. Outsourcing the entire project gets you a store that matches how you sell, at a cost that reflects the approach you choose. A hybrid approach — using a platform as the base and solving specific bottlenecks separately — is often the most manageable in practice: you only pay for custom work where it’s genuinely needed. Not sure you’re ready for an online store at all? Start with the broader question behind having a website built: without sales ambitions, a good informational site is often the better investment.

If you’re unsure about the platform choice itself, start with the question of what you sell and how you work today. Our e-commerce websites page explains how we run an online store project at Straffe Sites, from the initial discussion to ongoing management.

Conclusion

The cost of an online store depends on your catalog, your ordering flow, and your integrations, not on a market average. The cost drivers above help you read quotes; the cost structure helps you estimate the total bill over three years. The best thing you can bring to a conversation with a builder isn’t a number — it’s an honest picture of what you sell and how you work today. With that picture, a custom online store becomes a decision instead of a gamble.