E-commerce Website Cost UK 2026: £1,500 to £80,000

How much does an e-commerce website cost in the UK? In 2026 the indicative ranges are £1,500–£4,000 for a lightly customised hosted store, £5,000–£15,000 for a properly designed Shopify or WooCommerce build, £15,000–£40,000 for a bespoke storefront and £30,000–£80,000+ for headless commerce, all excluding VAT. Then add the running costs a brochure site never has: a platform subscription, payment processing of roughly 1.5–2.9% plus a small fixed fee on every order, and the per-product cost of photography, copy and data entry.

Quotes vary this wildly because a shop is not a website with a buy button bolted on. It is operational software. It has to hold accurate stock, take money without losing it, calculate shipping and VAT correctly, tell your warehouse what to pick, tell your accountant what happened, and stay upright when a campaign lands. So this guide deliberately prices the whole thing rather than the build alone: what you pay once, what you pay every month, and what you pay per product. On a real catalogue the build is often the smallest of the three, which is exactly the number most quotes show you and most budgets forget. If you want the wider picture across every kind of site, our guide to website costs in the UK covers brochure builds and web apps too. This article stays on commerce.

How much does an e-commerce website cost in the UK in 2026?

Here are indicative UK ranges for 2026, excluding VAT, assuming UK-based designers and developers rather than the cheapest offshore option. The “from” figures assume a sensible catalogue size and no unusual complexity.

Most UK small and mid-sized retailers land in the second tier, roughly £5,000–£15,000. Below that you are buying a theme with your logo on it, which is a perfectly rational first step. Above it you are buying engineering, and that only pays for itself once order volume, catalogue complexity or international trading make the platform’s defaults genuinely expensive.

Work one through. A 250-SKU fashion brand on a customised Shopify build might pay around £9,000 for design and build, then 250 products at roughly £25 a packshot, £25 of copy and £8 of loading, which is another £14,500. Add about £250 a month to run it before card fees and year one comes to roughly £26,500, not the £9,000 on the quote. None of that is padding. It is the difference between buying a website and opening a shop.

Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build: what are you paying for?

Shopify is the default for good reason. You rent hosting, security patching, PCI compliance, a checkout that converts and uptime that somebody else worries about. That keeps the build cheaper and the launch faster, but the monthly fee is permanent, the checkout is largely off-limits until you reach the enterprise tier, and anything the platform does not do natively arrives as another paid app.

WooCommerce flips the trade. The plugin itself is free and you own everything, including the awkward parts: hosting, updates, plugin conflicts, backups and security. Build costs are broadly comparable to a customised Shopify project, sometimes higher because you are assembling a stack rather than configuring one, and the ongoing maintenance burden is heavier. It suits businesses that already run WordPress, need unusual content and commerce alongside each other, or want to avoid a per-transaction platform relationship.

The choice is easier to settle with arithmetic than with opinion. Take a shop turning over £5,000 a month across 100 orders. On Shopify Basic that is £25 of subscription, about £125 in card fees at 2% plus 25p an order, and £60–£120 for three typical apps: call it £210–£270 a month. The same shop on WooCommerce pays no licence fee, but managed hosting and paid extensions for those same three jobs land at roughly £80–£180, so the software saving is £50 to £100 a month at most. That is the entire prize, and it disappears the moment you pay somebody to do the patching, backups and PCI work Shopify includes in its fee.

Shopify’s own plans are really a card-rate purchase rather than a feature purchase: Basic is £25 a month at 2% plus 25p, Grow is £65 at 1.7% and Advanced is £344 at 1.5% (Shopify’s published UK prices, September 2026). Divide the extra subscription by the rate saving and Grow only beats Basic above about £13,000 a month in card sales, while Advanced only beats Grow above roughly £140,000 a month. Most UK shops upgrade a tier or two earlier than the maths justifies.

A bespoke or headless build separates the shop front from the commerce engine: a custom front end handles design, speed and storytelling while an API handles carts, payments and orders. You get near-total design freedom, strong Core Web Vitals scores and no template ceiling, at the cost of a much larger build and a real development budget forever after. Our comparison of Next.js and WordPress for business websites walks through the same trade-off in more detail.

What does it actually cost to run an e-commerce site each month?

The build is the visible number. The recurring costs are the ones that decide whether the store is profitable, and they scale with revenue rather than sitting still:

• Platform subscription. Shopify’s published UK plans are £25 a month for Basic, £65 for Grow and £344 for Advanced, with Shopify Plus starting at £1,800 a month (Shopify UK pricing, September 2026). WooCommerce has no licence fee, but managed WordPress hosting capable of running a real shop is usually £20–£200+ a month.
• Payment processing. Card fees are typically around 1.5–2.9% of each order plus roughly 20–30p, with international cards, American Express and some payment methods sitting higher. On £30,000 of monthly turnover at 2%, that is about £600 a month before anything else. Some platforms also add their own transaction fee if you use an external gateway.
• Apps and third-party subscriptions. Reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, advanced search, email and SMS, returns portals — each is £10–£100 a month and a mature store easily reaches £200–£800 a month in total.
• Maintenance and support. A shop needs patching, monitoring and someone on the end of a phone when checkout breaks at 9pm. A shop typically sits on a Pro or e-commerce care plan at £250–£600 a month, rising to £600–£2,000+ for an enterprise or custom-app store; our guide to website maintenance costs in the UK sets out what each tier should include.
• Ongoing optimisation. Merchandising, A/B testing, landing pages for campaigns and conversion work typically sit on a retainer from £750–£3,000+ a month. This is optional at launch and close to essential once you are spending on ads.

Rule of thumb: budget 20–25% of the build cost per year for platform fees, maintenance and support, noticeably more than the 15–20% a brochure site needs, and treat payment processing as a separate line of roughly 2% of revenue.

How much should you budget per product for photography and content?

This is the cost most first-time sellers miss entirely, and on a large catalogue it can exceed the build. Think in cost per SKU rather than one lump sum. Straightforward packshots on a white background, shot in volume, typically work out at £15–£40 per product. Styled or lifestyle imagery with a set, props and a stylist is more like £75–£250 per product. Short product video sits around £150–£500 per item depending on how much motion and setup is involved. Our guide to food and product photography costs in the UK covers day rates and what changes the number.

Then there is getting it all into the shop. Writing product descriptions that are useful to a buyer and legible to a search engine is usually £25–£75 per product. Data entry — titles, variants, weights, dimensions, categories, metadata, alt text — costs around £5–£20 per SKU if an agency does it, and takes considerably longer than anyone expects if you do it yourself. Run the arithmetic before you commit: 300 products at £30 photography, £35 copy and £10 loading is £22,500. On a catalogue that size, content is the project and the website is the smaller half of the invoice.

What do integrations and migrating an existing store cost?

An online shop rarely stands alone. Every system it talks to is a line in the quote. A well-supported connector configured and tested — accounting into Xero or QuickBooks, shipping labels through Royal Mail, DPD or a multi-carrier tool, an email platform, a reviews service — typically costs £500–£2,000 each. Where it gets expensive is bespoke middleware: syncing live stock with an EPOS system across physical shops, pushing orders into an ERP, or maintaining a product information manager as the single source of truth. Budget £5,000–£20,000+ for that kind of work, and expect it to need ongoing attention as both ends change.

Replatforming an existing store is its own project, typically £2,500–£10,000+ on top of the build. That is the migration increment rather than an all-in figure: add it to a £15,000–£40,000 bespoke storefront and you land inside the £20,000–£60,000+ replatform band used in our redesign costs guide. The cost sits in the unglamorous parts: mapping old URLs to new ones with proper redirects so you keep the search visibility you have already earned, moving customer accounts and order history, migrating live subscriptions without failed payments, and reconciling product data that has drifted over the years. Skip the redirect work and you can lose a meaningful share of organic revenue overnight. If you are weighing up a rebuild against a tidy-up, our guide to website redesign costs in the UK is a useful companion read.

What drives an e-commerce quote up or down?

Two shops selling roughly the same number of products can differ by a factor of ten. These are the levers that move the number:

• Catalogue size and product complexity. Fifty simple products is one job. Five thousand SKUs with size, colour and material variants, made-to-order options or configurable bundles is another entirely.
• Checkout requirements. Trade pricing, customer-specific catalogues, purchase orders, deposits, split shipments and age verification all push you towards higher platform tiers or a custom build, because standard checkouts are deliberately locked down.
• Number and depth of integrations. Two off-the-shelf connectors is a fortnight. Live two-way stock sync with a warehouse system is a project in its own right.
• Design ambition and merchandising. A bespoke design system, editorial landing pages, motion and considered product storytelling cost more than restyling a theme. The broader picture is in our breakdown of web design pricing in the UK.
• Content readiness. If photography, descriptions and product data are already clean and consistent, the build moves fast. If they are in a spreadsheet nobody trusts, that becomes billable time.
• Compliance and trading rules. UK and EU VAT treatment, international duties, recurring payments, strong customer authentication and accessibility all add testing rather than glamour.
• Peak traffic. A store that has to survive a Black Friday spike or an influencer post needs caching, load testing and headroom that a steady-state site does not.

Speed deserves a special mention, because on a shop it is revenue rather than vanity. Slow product and category pages lose sales before anyone reaches the basket, and hitting the loading and responsiveness thresholds properly takes deliberate engineering. That is exactly why a fast custom store costs more than a plugin-heavy one. Our plain-English explainer on Core Web Vitals covers what to measure.

Which e-commerce setup is right for you?

Choose a hosted starter if you are proving demand and would rather spend your money on stock and ads than on a website. Choose a customised Shopify or WooCommerce build once orders are consistent and the shop is genuinely how you make money — this is the right answer for most UK retailers. Choose bespoke when the platform’s limits are costing you real revenue: complex products, trade customers, warehouse integration. Choose headless when performance, content and international trading are core to the brand and you have the budget to maintain it. There is no correct price, only the right fit for your stage and catalogue.

At 9495 Creative we design and build stores in London with in-house designers and developers, and because we also shoot photography and video, your product imagery and your storefront come from one team rather than four suppliers. Ready to get a real figure? Start a brief and tell us what you sell, how many SKUs you have and what systems it needs to talk to. We will come back with an honest scope, a fixed GBP price and a realistic timeline — no vague agency waffle.

What should be in an e-commerce quote (and what usually is not)?

Most arguments about e-commerce budgets are not arguments about price. They are arguments about scope, discovered in week six. A quote you can genuinely compare against another one itemises the following, with a figure against each line rather than a single number at the bottom.

• The theme or framework licence, named, with its cost stated rather than assumed.
• Payment, shipping and tax configuration: which gateways, which carriers, and how VAT is displayed and calculated.
• Product loading for a stated SKU count, with that number written down and a rate for anything beyond it.
• A staging environment you can see the build on before it is live.
• Browser and device QA, including a real test purchase on a real phone.
• A redirect map if you are replacing an existing shop. Our website redesign checklist sets out what that involves.
• Handover training and documentation, so that adding a product is not a support ticket.

What is usually not in the number, and should be quoted separately rather than discovered later: photography, product copywriting, app and extension subscriptions, cleaning up product data that arrives as a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and changes requested after sign-off. None of that is a supplier being sly. Those costs are genuinely variable and most of them depend on you. So the useful question at proposal stage is not “does this include everything”, it is “what will I be invoiced for that is not on this page”. A good supplier answers in a sentence. Ask it in writing, and ask what happens to the price if the SKU count changes, because on a real catalogue it always does.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an e-commerce website cost in the UK?

An e-commerce website in the UK typically costs £1,500–£4,000 for a lightly customised hosted store, £5,000–£15,000 for a properly designed Shopify or WooCommerce build, £15,000–£40,000 for a bespoke storefront and £30,000–£80,000+ for headless commerce, all excluding VAT. Budget separately for platform subscriptions, payment processing of roughly 1.5–2.9% per order, and per-product photography and content loading.

Is Shopify or WooCommerce cheaper to run?

Shopify costs more monthly and less to worry about: UK plans are £25 a month for Basic, £65 for Grow and £344 for Advanced, with Shopify Plus from £1,800. WooCommerce has no licence fee but you pay £20–£200+ a month for managed hosting and carry a heavier maintenance burden, typically a £250–£600 care plan. Build costs are broadly similar, roughly £5,000–£15,000 for a customised store, and the software saving on WooCommerce is rarely more than £50–£100 a month.

What are the ongoing costs of running an online shop?

Beyond the build, expect a platform subscription from £25 a month on Shopify Basic up to £344 on Advanced, payment processing of roughly 1.5–2.9% plus 20–30p per order, £200–£800 a month in apps and third-party subscriptions, and a Pro care plan at £250–£600 a month. A useful rule of thumb is 20–25% of the build cost per year for upkeep, plus around 2% of revenue in card fees.

How much does product photography cost for an e-commerce site?

Think in cost per SKU. Plain packshots shot in volume typically cost £15–£40 per product, styled or lifestyle imagery £75–£250, and short product video £150–£500 per item. Add £25–£75 per product for descriptions and £5–£20 for data entry. On a 300-product catalogue that can total £20,000 or more, often exceeding the website build itself.

How much does it cost to migrate an existing online store?

Replatforming an existing store typically costs £2,500–£10,000+ on top of the new build, depending on catalogue size and trading history. The cost sits in mapping old URLs to new ones with proper redirects so you keep the search visibility you have earned, moving customer accounts and order history, migrating active subscriptions, and cleaning product data that has drifted over the years.

How long does it take to build an e-commerce website?

A hosted starter store usually takes 3–5 weeks, a customised Shopify or WooCommerce build 8–12 weeks, and a bespoke or headless storefront 12–20 weeks or more. The build is rarely what causes the delay. Photography, product copy and clean product data are what hold launches up, so start those in week one rather than waiting for the design to be signed off.

How much does an e-commerce website cost for a clothing brand?

A fashion store sits in the same £5,000–£15,000 band as any customised Shopify or WooCommerce build, plus roughly £2,000–£5,000 for variant handling, size guides and a returns portal. The larger number is usually imagery: at £15–£40 a packshot and £75–£250 for styled shots, a 250-SKU range can cost more to photograph and write than to build.