How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost in the UK? (2026)

Most UK businesses pay between around £4,000 and £15,000 to have a professional ecommerce store built in 2026, with a basic store starting near £2,000 and large, custom builds running well beyond £20,000. The build is only half the story. An online store also costs money to run every month, anywhere from around £20 for a bare-bones shop on a basic plan to a realistic £150 to £400 for an established store once you add apps, maintenance and the fee taken on every order.

That running cost is the part most cost guides skip, and it is the part that catches businesses out. An ecommerce store is not a brochure website with a buy button. It carries a platform fee, a stack of apps, payment processing on every sale, and more to keep maintained. This guide lays out the full picture: what a store costs to build, what it costs to run, and what drives the number up or down.

We design and build ecommerce stores on Shopify, WooCommerce and Shopwired, so these are the figures we quote and the ones we see across the UK market. If you want the wider picture for any kind of website, our guide to UK website costs covers that. This one is about online stores specifically.

How much does it cost to build an ecommerce store?

Most ecommerce projects fall into three broad tiers. The figures below are agency build costs across the UK, not just our own, and where you land depends on how custom the store needs to be.

Figures reflect 2026 UK agency build costs, based on our own project pricing and published market ranges. They cover the build itself, not the monthly running costs below, and assume an agency build rather than a do-it-yourself store on a template, which you can do for the platform fee alone if you have the time and the skills.

The jump between tiers is rarely about size. It is about how much the store has to do beyond listing products and taking payment, which is the part we come back to further down. At the most involved end, a project that merges several sites into one, adds a full trade or wholesale portal, or runs subscriptions alongside sits at the top of these ranges and beyond, often £20,000 to £50,000, in line with the largest builds in our general cost guide. Most stores fall within the three tiers above.

What does an ecommerce build include?

A genuine agency build is more than a styled storefront, and the gap between two quotes for the same store usually comes down to what each one includes. A proper ecommerce build should cover:

• Discovery and strategy: understanding your products, your customers and how you sell, before any design starts.
• Design: a store designed around your brand and built to convert, not a lightly skinned template.
• Development and setup: building the store, loading your products and collections, and configuring payments, tax and shipping so it is ready to trade.
• Content: product copy, image preparation and the key pages, or clear guidance if you are providing your own.
• Launch and handover: testing across devices, going live cleanly, and training you to run the store yourself.

When you compare quotes, the question to ask is which of these each agency includes and which they treat as extras. Two quotes for the same store can look very different on paper if one assumes you are bringing your own product photography, copy and setup and the other includes them.

What does an ecommerce store cost to run each month?

Every website has ongoing costs: hosting, a domain, and the upkeep to keep it secure and current. The ongoing costs for an online store add up to more than most people expect - there are four parts: the platform, the apps, maintenance, and the fees on every sale.

The platform fee depends on what you build on. Shopify runs from around £19 a month on its basic plan up to £259 or more for its advanced tier. WooCommerce has no platform fee, but you pay for hosting, realistically £20 to £50 a month for a managed setup, plus any premium plugins. Shopwired sits between the two, from around £35 a month, with no transaction fees built in.

Then there are apps. A lean, effective stack, things like email marketing, reviews, shipping and security, runs around £40 to £100 a month. An established store with more moving parts can reach £100 to £250. Maintenance is the line people forget: keeping a store secure, updated and fast costs from around £40 a month on a managed platform to £200 or more on a self-hosted WooCommerce site, whether that is your own time or a support retainer.

Add it together and a realistic all-in running cost for a small-to-mid UK store with a proper app stack and managed maintenance is £150 to £400 a month, before any marketing. A bare-bones shop run lean, on a basic plan with few paid apps and your own upkeep, can be much less, closer to the platform fee of £20 to £40 a month. The more the store has to do, the higher the figure climbs, and over a year even the middle of that range runs to several thousand pounds, which is why the running cost deserves as much thought as the build.

How much do payment fees cost on every sale?

The fee charged on every order is the cost most businesses underestimate, because it scales with your success. Every sale you make pays a small percentage to process the payment.

If you use Shopify Payments, the fee runs from 2% plus 25p per transaction on the basic plan down to 1.5% on the advanced one. Use a different processor such as Stripe instead, which charges around 1.5% plus 20p on UK cards, and Shopify adds its own extra fee on top, from 2% down to 0.6% depending on your plan, unless you switch to Shopify Payments. WooCommerce and Shopwired do not add a platform fee, so you pay only your gateway, with PayPal around 2.9% plus 30p.

It sounds small until you do the sums. A store taking £10,000 a month at roughly 2% pays around £200 a month to process payments, or £2,400 a year, purely to take money. Depending on the platform and how you take payment, that figure can swing by hundreds of pounds a year. How each platform handles these transaction fees is one of the things we compare in Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Shopwired.

What drives the cost of an ecommerce store up or down?

Two stores can both cost £6,000 and be very different builds, so what sits inside the price matters more than the headline number. A few factors explain most of the variation.

Custom functionality is the biggest single driver. Each bespoke feature, a subscription model, a booking engine, a made-to-order product builder, typically adds a few thousand pounds, and sometimes well over ten.

Integrations are the other big one. Connecting your store to the systems you already run, your accounts software, your stock or fulfilment system, is some of the most involved work in any build, and a reliable connection to something like Sage 50 can shape the whole project.

The size of your catalogue matters less than people assume. More products mean more setup, but it is the complexity, variants, custom pricing, trade tiers, rather than the raw number, that moves the cost. Migration adds time and budget if you are moving an existing store rather than starting fresh, more so the larger and older the store. And design and content span a wide range: a lightly customised template sits at the lower end, while a fully custom design runs into the tens of thousands, with product photography and copywriting easy to underestimate and a real factor in how well a store sells.

So what should you budget for an ecommerce store?

Here is a realistic way to budget, depending on where your business sits:

• Getting online with a simple range: around £2,000 to £6,000 to build, and from around £20 a month to run on a basic plan, rising toward £100 to £150 with a few apps and managed maintenance.
• An established brand wanting a custom store: around £4,000 to £10,000 to build, and £150 to £300 a month.
• A bigger catalogue with integrations, trade or subscriptions: £8,000 to £20,000 and up to build, and £250 to £500 a month.

The point worth holding onto, whatever the tier, is that the cheapest store is rarely the cheapest in the end. A store built down to a price that then does not sell costs far more in lost orders than the saving was worth. If your store has traffic but not sales, the problem is usually the build rather than the budget, and we cover that in why your Shopify store isn't selling.

The number that matters with an ecommerce store is not what it costs to build. It is what it earns once it is live, and what it costs you to run every month. We have seen businesses save a few thousand on the build and lose far more to a clunky checkout or a store nobody can find. Budget for the store you need, not the cheapest one you can get.

- Miles Debinski, Co-Founder & Technical Lead at Digital Otter

An ecommerce store is one of the better investments a growing business can make, but only when it is costed properly: the build, the running, and the fees, with a little headroom for the marketing that brings the customers in. Go in with the full picture and you avoid the nasty surprises that come from budgeting for the build alone.

If you would like a straight figure for your own store, we are happy to talk it through. Tell us about your project, read about our ecommerce web design and our web design in Cumbria.