Web development for ecommerce businesses
What an ecommerce build really costs, what actually drives the price, the platform lock-in trap, and the non-negotiables before you sign a store build.
Bands are editorial estimates, Q2 2026 — same method as the rate benchmarks. Your quote is scoped to your actual project.
An ecommerce store is not a website with products on it. It is a small operations system: catalog, checkout, payments, tax, shipping, email, and returns — each one a place where money leaks quietly when it is done wrong. The sites that feel simple to run are the ones where that plumbing was planned, not improvised.
Honest store builds land between $6,000 and $30,000. Where you fall inside that band is decided less by design and more by catalog size, product types, how many systems the store must talk to, and — the big hidden one — who enters and cleans the product data. A beautiful store with a messy catalog does not sell; the data is the store.
The platform decision is mostly a lock-in decision. Shopify is rented rails: fast to launch, limited at the edges, and you leave with your data but not your code. WooCommerce and custom builds are owned rails: unlimited at the edges, and you pay forever in maintenance instead of rent. Neither is wrong. What is wrong is discovering which one you chose only when you try to leave.
Quarterly, and only when the numbers move
Get the rate report before you negotiate.
Updated rate bands across the major stacks and regions, plus what changed and why. No other email.
Questions
Asked about hiring for ecommerce.
Shopify when you want to sell this quarter and accept platform limits and fees; WooCommerce when the store is the business, you want to own the code and the margins, and you have someone to maintain it. The honest test is the edge cases: subscription logic, complex wholesale rules, marketplace integrations. Write down your three weirdest requirements and ask which platform handles them natively — that answer picks the platform for you.
Three things, in order of frequency: product data (nobody budgeted for entering and cleaning it), edge-case checkout logic (tax rules, mixed carts, shipping zones), and integration surprises (the ERP or inventory system that turns out to have no usable API). All three are scoping failures, not development failures — which is why every store quote should show them as line items.
Platform-to-platform migrations typically run $1,000–20,000 depending on catalog size and URL structure, and the risk concentrates in one place: redirects. Every old product and category URL needs a mapped destination, or the search traffic you are paying for the privilege of keeping dies on launch day. A migration quote without a redirect map is a plan to lose rankings.
Yes, and it is usually right — with one discipline: build the later parts into the platform decision now, even if you build them never. Moving from 50 to 5,000 products is a Tuesday on the right platform and a rebuild on the wrong one. Scope small; choose the rails once.
Send the brief. Get a real number for your ecommerce project.
Scoped quote within two business days. If it's not a fit, you keep the scope and the numbers.
Related services
Ecommerce Development
Ecommerce builds ranked by the only metric that matters: what the store does to revenue, not how many features it has.
Hire a WooCommerce Developer
WooCommerce stores engineered for scale: custom checkout flows, sane data structures and performance that holds up as your catalog grows.
Hire a Shopify Developer
Shopify stores built to sell: custom themes, clean integrations and checkout flows that do not leak customers.
Website Speed & Performance
Speed work with numbers attached: budgets agreed upfront, real-device measurements, before/after evidence in the handover.