What does it cost to build an ecommerce store?

What ecommerce costs is decided first and foremost by the platform choice. A store built on a ready-made system like Shopify or WooCommerce costs a fraction of a composable solution built from scratch – but the ready-made platform also takes its cut in ongoing fees. Here’s the pricing by path, plus the two items most often underestimated: integrations and licenses.

Price ranges by platform choice

WooCommerce gives the lowest license cost but requires you to run operations yourself. Shopify is fastest to get started with but charges fees on an ongoing basis. A composable or custom solution costs many times more to build but gives full control – and pays off first at volume and with complex requirements.

An important insight is that the build price and the ongoing cost often move in opposite directions. The platform that’s cheapest to build can be the most expensive to run at volume, and vice versa. Shopify has a low entry step but fees on every order; WooCommerce is cheaper in license but puts operations on you; a custom solution is expensive to build but has no platform fees at all. Which ends up cheapest depends entirely on your volume and how long you’ll run the store.

Integrations: the biggest hidden item

An ecommerce store rarely stands alone. It has to talk to the rest of the business’s systems, and that’s where the cost often creeps in. The most common connections:

• ERP / business system. Orders, customers, and invoicing should sync automatically instead of being entered by hand.
• Inventory system. Stock levels have to match in real time so a customer doesn’t buy something that’s out of stock.
• PIM. Product data – images, text, attributes – maintained in one place and flowing out to the store.

Each such integration is its own small project with its own testing. The reason they get expensive is that the other system rarely does exactly what the store needs: data formats differ, updates have to sync in the right direction, and exceptions – an order that gets stuck, a stock level that doesn’t match – have to be handled without anyone watching. Together, the integrations can cost more than the store itself, and they’re almost always what drives the budget up in an ecommerce project.

The smartest thing you can do early is map out exactly which systems the store needs to talk to and how. A common and expensive mistake is treating integrations as an afterthought – “we’ll sort that out later” – and then discovering that later is the hardest and most costly part. The sooner the connections are known, the more predictable the price becomes.

License and transaction costs

The build is a one-time cost. The ongoing calculation consists of three parts: platform fee or hosting, licenses for apps and add-ons, and transaction fees on every order. On Shopify, a fee is added on top of the payment gateway if you don’t use their own payment solution, and that amount grows with revenue. What looks cheap to build can become more expensive to run – and vice versa.

Transaction fees are especially easy to underestimate. A percentage that feels small on a single order becomes a significant sum across thousands of orders a month, and it scales directly with sales. For a high-volume store, that item alone can be one of the strongest reasons to eventually move from a fee-based standard platform to a custom solution where you negotiate terms directly with the payment provider.

A concrete calculation example

Say you’re launching a store with 500 products, a connection to a business system for orders and inventory, and Swedish payment methods. On Shopify or WooCommerce, the build lands at SEK 300,000–550,000, with integrations as the heaviest item. Then expect a few thousand kronor a month for platform, apps, and transaction fees.

As the store grows to high volumes with its own business rules and a checkout you want to control yourself, a composable solution starts paying off. Not sure which path suits you? See our services or get in touch with your assortment and volume, and we’ll run the numbers on the alternatives.