Online Store Pricing: What Your Ecommerce Build Actually Costs
Most online store quotes are compared on the build price alone. That is the wrong number. A store has two separate costs: what it costs to launch, and what it costs to keep running. The second one is where owners get surprised, usually around month three, when the invoice keeps arriving and nothing is visibly broken.
What a build includes
Our store packages start at $2,500 for a brick and mortar business putting a catalog online, $3,500 for an e-tail setup, and $4,000 for a dropshipping operation. Every one of those includes the same base:
- A catalog of up to 100 products
- One year of domain registration
- One year of hosting and SSL
- Thirty days of support after launch
- Zero percent sales cut taken from your transactions
That last line matters more than it sounds. A lot of store builders and marketplaces take a percentage of every sale. We do not. The processor fee comes out of the transaction, but the platform does not take a second cut on top of it.
What a build does not include
Here is the part that gets left out of most proposals, including ours until you ask:
- Payment gateway setup and account approval
- Product photography
- Product descriptions and copywriting
- Ongoing marketing, ads, or search work
- Sales tax registration and filing
None of these are small. Photography for fifty products can cost more than the website. Sales tax registration in Nevada and in Illinois, if you ship across state lines, is a real compliance obligation with real penalties. A build quote that seemed reasonable next to those numbers is not unreasonable. It is incomplete.
What it costs after launch
Here is the recurring list, roughly in order of how often it surprises people:
- Hosting and care plans. $79, $149, or $199 per month depending on level. This is optional in the sense that you can let a site rot, but it is not optional in the sense that an unmaintained store eventually breaks.
- Payment processing. Roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, plus whatever your processor adds. On a small order, the flat 30 cents is a large share of the margin.
- Apps and plugins. Reviews, email capture, subscription boxes, shipping calculators. Useful, and each one is another thing to keep updated.
- Your own time. Updating inventory, answering questions, chasing shipping, handling returns. This is the largest line item for most small stores and it never appears on an invoice.
The honest summary
For most small businesses, the build is the cheapest part of owning a store. It is a defined, one-time cost with a clear finish line. Everything after it is ongoing, and it scales with how well the store does, which is a strange property for a cost.
Ask for a build quote and a yearly running cost estimate. If you only get the first one, you are not seeing the price.
